


Second City

by cooperjones2020



Series: Who Sings Heartache to Sleep [1]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Chicagooooo, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Jughead Jones on a motorcycle, Slow Burn, aka eventual smut, and pining, hopefully lots of feels, so the rating will change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-11-23 20:11:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 30,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11409360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cooperjones2020/pseuds/cooperjones2020
Summary: Sometimes she worries she’s settling — for a smaller job, a smaller city, a smallerlifethan she’d promised herself — but that was before she found out Jughead Jones lives in Chicago. That was before she found out the final secret of Jason Blossom’s murder.---------------Canon compliant through the end of season 1.





	1. In which Betty Cooper meets the ghost of high school past

There are some weeks you eat lots of kale salads and açai bowls and only drink green tea. Then there are weeks where you eat grilled cheese for four meals in a row and main-line stale coffee. This week is one of the latter. Which is why she is so glad Mary has invited her to dinner.

Her move had _not_ gone smoothly. A truck full of her boxes had somehow wound up in Kentucky, an unlikely outcome she refused to think too hard about because, really, that meant at some point the truck driver had to turn _left_ and _south_ instead of _right_ and _north_ but whatever. It’s fine.

It just means she is wearing rain boots and jeans instead of sandals and a flowy skirt. It is barely May but it is already summer in Chicago and the rubber is making her feet sweat.

But. _but_. Mary lives in a bungalow in Rogers Park, which is far north enough that people actually get to have yards and there are so many trees and everything is colourful and glorious and smells like flowers and barbecues and new beginnings.

She lingers a little, walking more and more slowly as she gets closer to the house, wanting to preserve this twilight in amber — the colors and the textures and the quiet and the utter peace she feels. Because, no matter how much of a disaster this week has been, no matter that she might have to wear ratty jeans to her first day of her new job tomorrow, this is the first decision she’s made in a long time that feels like it is really and truly _hers._ And that is something to celebrate.

Eventually the humidity gets to her though, and she doesn’t want to be late, doesn’t want Mary to worry she’s gotten on the red line the wrong way, so she knocks on the door while pulling a bottle of Syrah out of her tote bag.

Mary answers and immediately pulls her in for a hug. She clutches her own hands behind Mary’s back and lets out a sigh. After all these years, hugging Mary Andrews still feels more like home than hugging her own mother.

Mary had already been treated to the ongoing saga of Betty’s moving crisis — in fact, had calmed her down when she called crying because her dishes were in Kentucky so she couldn’t bring the casserole she’d promised for tonight. Mary made her promise to take a nap, and she had tried. She now knew she had 292 ceiling tiles in her bedroom.

So tonight is all about gossip and catch up and making plans for a new life.

“Did you get a chance to see my son before you left?”

Betty grins. “We had coffee last week. Did he tell you he has a date with Veronica?”

“Of course not. He doesn’t tell me about the girls he dates. I didn’t know you two had broken up until parent’s weekend of your freshman year when he introduced me to some girl named Lilah.”

_Oh Arch,_ never change. “Well they ran into each other at fashion week and have been talking since — she’s a buyer for Bloomingdale’s now — she asked him out right before I left.”

Conversation continues in the same vein, punctuated by trips to the kitchen for more wine and plates of cheese and grapes and other little hors d’oeuvres the likes of which Betty normally only sees on Pinterest.

Around 9, a knock sounds at the back door and startles them. Mary walks through the kitchen to answer it, and Betty can just see her between the walls of the hallway and the doorjamb. When she opens the door, all Betty can see is that the visitor is tall with dark hair.

Then he opens his mouth.

“Hey Mar, is Mike home yet? I didn’t see his bike.”

Mary steps back and it’s Jughead.

  


She hunches forward, even though there’s no way he could have seen her. And—more than that—no way Mary would let her get away without saying hi. A million thoughts spin through Betty’s mind like tilt-a-whirl but they all telescope down to the refrains “is my lipstick smudged?” and “Jughead.”

“No. Jug, I wasn’t expecting you. Mike had to go to London last minute this afternoon, he must have forgotten to text you.”

“Oh that’s okay, we were just gonna work on the desk for a while. Do you mind if I still do—” She could hear him walking into the house, the sounds of a helmet being set down, a jacket shrugged off. She processes these details from a distance, as if staring at the sun underwater.

“Of course not.” Mary finally closes the door. “Here, come into the living room, I’m having dinner with Betty.”

He stops in the hallway, a sudden interruption to the quiet _thump thump_ pattern of his feet on the wood. Her head is still hidden by the door. “Betty. Betty Cooper?”

But Mary is already pushing the door open. Betty tries to paste a nonchalant smile on her face.

“Of course Betty Cooper. Didn’t I tell you she was moving here?”

“No actually, I don’t think you did.” Is she imagining it or does his voice sound smaller?

And then he’s there. Taller than she remembers, maybe bigger too. Or maybe it’s just that she’s sitting down. She stands up, brushing her hands down her pants, trying to convince her stomach to stay where it belongs.

“Hi Jug.” She reaches a hand out for him to shake. That’s a thing people do, right?

“Betty Cooper.” He takes it but doesn’t shake. Maybe it’s not. Her stomach vaults back up into her throat.

Everything about him is so very strange and yet exactly the same. He _is_ bigger. His hair is shorter. There is the slightest bit of scruff on his cheeks and down his neck. But he is still wearing a black t shirt and he still has a flannel shirt tied around his waist and she can see the beanie sticking out of his pocket. His eyes, all the colours of the ocean during a thunderstorm, still seem to cut right through her. She doesn’t realize she’s holding her breath.

“Can I get you some food, Jug?”

His eyes widen and he drops her hand. “Always, Mary. Do you even have to ask?”

When Mary turns back to the kitchen, Betty takes the moment to sit down, tucking her hands beneath her thighs. He follows suit in the chair across from her.

They stare at each other. This is going to get awkward fast.

“Did you say something about a desk?”

“A—? Oh yeah. Mike and I are restoring this turn-of-the-century roll-top desk Mary found at an estate stale. It was a gift when _The Final Fissure_ hit the bestseller list.”

Her eyes stray to her purse, and the book just peaking out of the top. He must have seen her because when she turns back, he is staring at her purse and one corner of his mouth has quirked up. She blushes. Then she blushes more because she can feel herself blushing.

“If you ask me if I want an autograph, I’ll clock you.” He laughs.

“I would never.” But before she can stop him, he is up and pulling the book out.

“Why, Betty Cooper, no annotations? I’m shocked.” Could her face get any redder?

“Actually—that might be my second copy. I got to the airport way too early and, in a whirlwind of productivity, I’d already shipped all my books here—well not here, cause they’re in Lexington at the moment—but I didn’t have anything to read and I’d already finished the newspaper and it was on display in Hudson’s. I picked it up just to look at but before I knew it you’d sucked me back in. So I bought it so I’d have something to do on the plane.” God, Betty, stop talking.

“Hey you don’t have to justify buying my book to me.”

She wants to say _I love it, Jug. I’m so proud of you, Jug. How did you get here from there, Jug? What happened to you when you left me? Do you know how long it took to put me back together?_ But the words get stuck in her mouth, repeating.

Mary comes back in with a plate piled comically high with food and the moment is broken.

“Here you go, Jug. Let me know if you need anything else.” He drops the book back into her purse, gives her a quick wave with the chicken leg already en route to his mouth, and disappears into the basement, and, presumably, into his furniture restoration.

She blinks and tries to mentally re-settle herself.

“So,” she begins. “Jughead?”

A tender look crosses Mary’s face. She is—apparently—oblivious to the current of electricity that seems to run from Betty to her purse and down the stairs to the flannel-clad man.

“That boy. You know it took me a year of inviting him over after he moved here to finally get him to come? I had to show up outside the library at Northwestern and ambush him. He was afraid I was just being polite because he and Archie hadn’t talked in a while.”

“A while” may have been an understatement but Betty doesn’t think this is the best time to correct her. To Mary, it’s just college that drove them all apart. Old friends on different paths. After all, that is what happened to Betty and Archie, and, as she learns when Mary continues, the end of college did bring Jughead and Archie back together.

But Mary, safely ensconced in her new life in Chicago, hadn’t seen the fall out of the Jughead-and-Betty break-up, hadn’t seen the broken pieces that sometimes still cause Betty to wonder if she’ll ever be able to sand them down far enough.

  


They can’t get back to the place they were before Jughead arrived, joking about Archie’s dating mishaps and all the new men to be surveyed in Chicago.

After an hour of stilted chatter and awkward silences, “I know you’re way too big for this now, but would you mind letting me braid your hair?”

Betty smiles. When she was little her mother had volunteered her and Polly as models when Mary wanted to learn to French braid. Polly could never sit still. But when it was her turn, Archie would bring her legos to play with and snacks. She had spent many afternoons on a bar stool at the Andrews’ kitchen island, constructing castles while her blonde locks were tugged and twisted.

“Of course.” She sets her glass of wine down and rolls off the couch to sit in front of Mary.

She cut it off before she left New York, into an angled bob that brushes the tops of her shoulders when straight, but skims her chin when she lets it air dry into waves and curls—a style she’s been trying to embrace lately — a more laid back version of herself she’s consciously trying to cultivate. A more laid-back city, a more laid-back Betty.

The activity makes the silence feel less awkward. And the soothing feeling of Mary’s nails scratching her scalp soon lulls Betty to sleep.

  


She comes to slowly. Her mouth feels fuzzy and there are voices above her.

“I was going to just let her sleep on the couch but I’d forgotten you were here. Maybe you could carry her upstairs.” You. You? _Jughead?_

“I’m awake!” She sits up and peels her eyelids open.

He smirks at her and her traitorous heart gives a single, loud _thump._ “Hey Pippi Longstocking.”

She’s confused for a minute but then remembers the braids, raising a hand to her head to confirm.

  


“No, Betty, you’re not riding the red line home by yourself this late at night.”

She tries to protest. It’s not like she has to switch trains, it’s not that late, it’s not that many stops. But Mary chimes in and she is outvoted and before she knows it, she is pushed out into the now-cold night and is strapped into one of Mike’s spare helmets.

Mary kisses her helmet, then Jughead’s, and then it’s just the two of them.

“So where to, Miss Daisy?”

She names the address.

“Of course you live in River North.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ask me again in a month if you haven’t figured it out.” She rolls her eyes but secretly gloms onto “in a month” like he still expects to be talking to her in a month?

“And where do you live?”

“In Logan Square. And before you say anything, I lived there before the hipsters moved in.”

She gapes at him. “Really? Before the hipsters moved in? Well okay then. By all means, continue to proselytize on the ills of gentrification.”

He glares at her through his visor and for a moment, just for a moment, it feels light and easy. It feels like Sunday night milkshakes at Pop’s and swapping English homework in the Blue and Gold office. The thought makes her chest ache, and her self-consciousness descends like a blanket.

It is cold on the back of the motorcycle, colder, even, than she had imagined it would be. That is why she snuggles more deeply into the back of his leather jacket—brown not black. No embroidery. She’d double checked. He smells like coffee and cigarettes and petrichor. And that fucking kills her. How does a person get to smell like the morning after a thunderstorm?

She’s had that thought before.

When they pull up outside her building and she returns the helmet and finds her land legs, she reaches out. “Thanks, Juggie.”

Then she realizes what she’s done and presses her lips into a tight, white line.

He puts a hand on her shoulder and runs it down her arm until he reaches her hand on her own. He lifts it off and squeezes. “Night Betts.”

“Night.” Then she disappears into her building and turns back to watch him through the tempered glass. A moment later, the motorcycle slings its way around the corner and is gone.


	2. In which Betty Cooper is a stereotypical millennial who can’t make a phone call

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Green pen underlined the phrases and passages that made her want to weep and shake Jughead. To ask him how he strung together phrases that swept through her like fire, that absolved like the sea. Green pen underlined the places that laid bare the relationship between the man who’d written the words and the boy who’d lived them. The green pen underlined the places where he’d laid her bare.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Betty is a basic bitch and I’m not sorry. 
> 
> This fic is quickly spiralling into a love letter to my favorite city. I’m not sorry about that either.
> 
> Also, let’s pretend Jughead and Jellybean are slightly more than six years apart, like eight, or even ten. That would make my underachieving ass feel better.

It has been three weeks since Jughead drove her home, stroked her arm, and called her Betts.

She is on her third re-read of _The Final Fissure_. Her airport copy is now nearly as worn and marked as her hardcover from the first print run.

She could never read it through just once. Each time she picked it up, she went through at least three re-reads. Pencil sketched out her initial thoughts. Blue pen compared Betty’s memories, her knowledge of the case notes, to Jughead’s narration. Green pen underlined the phrases and passages that made her want to weep and shake Jughead. To ask him how he strung together phrases that swept through her like fire, that absolved like the sea. Green pen underlined the places that laid bare the relationship between the man who’d written the words and the boy who’d lived them. The green pen underlined the places where he’d laid her bare.

 

She is reading on her lunch break, green pen tucked behind her ear, when Cynthia walks in.

“Aren’t you kind of behind the times? That came out over two years ago.”

“Oh I’ve read it before.” She sets the book down and moves the pen to the spine to mark her place. Cynthia sees her annotations. “Jeez, you in a book club or something?”

“What? Oh no, I just went to high school with him.”

“Him. You went to high school with FP Jones III.” She picks up the book and holds the back cover, with Jughead’s headshot and author blurb, up next to her face. Her eyes slide to the picture on Betty’s desk of her and Archie with their parents at their high school graduation. “What is in the water in your town?”

It’s a joke people have made about Sweetwater River before. For years in fact. But, since Betty was in high school, those jokes have centered on murder and corruption and cover ups. They have come perilously close to touching her family.

Cynthia does not know about that. Or, if her background checks have turned up anything tangential to Jason Blossom’s death more than ten years ago, she has been kind enough not to mention it. So Betty just shrugs and gives her a smile that turns down at the corners.

“And how are you settling in?”

“Good, I think! I’m putting the finishing touches on the profile of the independent bookstores in different parts of the city.”

“Great, you can send it to me to look over when you’re done. But I meant how are you settling in in general? Are you getting around okay? Do you need suggestions? A brunch date? A social life?”

Betty swallows the grin she can feel pulling on her face. She loves Cynthia—had missed her when she left New York a year ago—loved that she’d personally reached out to Betty and wooed her to the Tribune right when she was ready for it. But sometimes the woman acted like an overbearing aunt.

“The answer is, still, good. The rest of my boxes finally arrived and I got a Divvy Bike subscription for the summer. And you’re not the only person I know here, Cynth. I had dinner with my ex’s mom a few weeks ago.”

“Well, I’m glad for that, but I don’t think it counts.”

“Hey, it so does! And we have plans to go to a farmer’s market and her boyfriend is getting us tickets for a Cubs game. And I ran into Jughead — FP — while I was there.”

“Again, all good things, but that sounds more like _her_ social life and — Jughead? FP Jones goes by Jughead?”

“It’s a childhood nickname thing.”

“Wait, Betty—you _know_ FP Jones. Like, nickname-level know him.”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.”

“You need to interview him!”

“What? Why?” Her heart kickstarts into a merengue.

“Well for one, he has a new book coming out soon so someone from the paper needs to interview him. For two, I hired you specifically for Printers Row.”

Cynthia gives her an appraising look, then continues: “Look, I know this job is downsizing for you. I know it’s less money and I know New York is the center of the writing world. It’s not investigative journalism. You’ll probably have to write more puff pieces than longform for a while. I practically had to promise you my left kidney to get you out here. But I meant it when I said I thought this move would be good for you, that an Arts beat would be good or you. You write better interviews than anyone I know. FP Jones is a rising star. It would be a great opportunity. For _both_ of you.”

“Okay, we’ll blow past the drama queen antics for now. No bodily organs were exchanged in the making of this job contract. Jughead and I…aren’t on the best of terms. We haven’t even talked since high school. We just both happen to come from the same small town is all. We know the same people.”

“Well that could be better! You know—you’ll be able to be more objective about him while breathing life into the background, really telling the story. You can give us another lens on what makes Riverdale tick — that whole seedy underbelly of small town America schtick he’s working with.”

Betty capitulates with a groan. She could see she wouldn’t get out of this without a fight she isn’t ready have while this new on the job.

“Look, I don’t have a way to contact him. But I’ll try. I can call Archie’s mom.”

“Perfect.” Cynthia folds her hands over her crossed leg and cocks her head at Betty.

“You want me to try now?”

“Why not?”

“Okay, fine,” she grumbles. She prays Mary is in court.

Her prayers are not answered.

“Hey Mar! No, yeah I’m good…You?…No sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just wanted to ask if you had Jughead’s email address. I had a—a work question.” Her eyes bulge when Mary offers her his number instead, and she quickly looks down to the hand picking at her skirt hem. Cynthia knows her tells. “No, no, his email’s good for now. Thanks. Talk to you soon. Love you too. Bye.”

 

When Cynthia waltzes out ten minutes later, Betty’s inbox already contains an email from Mary with Jughead’s contact info, so she leaves with a Cheshire Cat grin on her perfectly made-up face.

Betty sighs. She really doesn’t want to do this. It feels like taking advantage of an old relationship. An old friendship. She doesn’t want to make Jughead uncomfortable. But she also doesn’t want to make _herself_ uncomfortable.

She looks at the book on her desk, moving her thumb to trace the curve of his mouth, the slope of his jaw.

It takes her four hours to write the email. Not that she just sits there and stares at the computer screen for four hours. She’s still Betty Cooper. She sends other emails, sets up meetings, finishes proofreading her article. She takes a power walk around the block with the running shoes she keeps stashed in her purse. She does a ruthless purge until she hits inbox zero. She multitasks.

But always in the back of her mind: _Dear Jughead? Dear Jug? Dear J?…Dear Jones?…Would ‘Hi’ be better than ‘Dear’?_ Ugh I hate myself.

Finally, at quarter to five, she shuts her eyes and hits send, then immediately begins packing up for the day.

When she goes to log off her computer, he’s already responded. Fuck.

“Hi Betty,

Of course we can set up an interview. Unfortunately all that stuff has to go through my agent and I’m sitting at a gate at O’Hare at the moment on my way back to Riverdale. If you don’t mind waiting, we can set something up next week. But if you’re up for it, I have a Skype call with him on Thursday and we’re due to talk about my promotional schedule anyway.

Let me know whatever works.

Best,

J.”

_He_ certainly didn’t spend hours stewing and overthinking every damn syllable.

 

She agrees to set up the call for Thursday afternoon. Cynthia is so pleased with her she gives her permission to work from home for the day.

In Betty’s lexicon, ‘work from home’ means go on a really long run to burn off excess adrenaline and come home with a sugar coma-inducing drink from Starbucks.

So, she stands on the edge of Promontory Point, still shivering a little in her gym shorts in the early morning breeze off the lake. She forces herself through some Ujjayi breaths. One of the biggest differences she’s noticed thus far from New York is the sheer variety of scents in the air. No one leaves their trash on the curb here. There’s a chocolate factory downtown and its aromas waft over the city with the afternoon heat. In the mornings, the lake exhales a melange of algae and minerals as it laps against the rocks.

Today is the first time she’s felt panicky since moving to Chicago. Moving debacles aside, the whole experience had been pretty damn _empowering_. She found a sublet for her old apartment and a gorgeous new one. She hired a moving van. She made the calls to end and start her utilities. She told Alice Cooper where to stuff it when she tried to make Betty feel guilty. And she ended a relationship that wasn’t making her happy anymore, appearances her damned.

She takes a picture of the skyline across the lake and instragrams it with the skyscraper emoji and the caption “Sweet Home #Chicago.” Then, she tightens her laces and takes back off.

Sometimes she worries that by moving here she’s settling — for a smaller job, a smaller city, a smaller _life_ than she’d promised herself — but then she remembers the other things her younger self used to want and shakes those anxieties off. Maybe people don’t decide whether their lives will be large or small. Maybe life decides for them. Maybe the correlation between size and value is smaller than she’s been led to believe.

And that is okay. She is learning that that is okay.

 

A few hours later, she sits on the floor in front of the coffee table, her laptop propped on a stack of books, and waits for Jughead’s call. This she can handle. This is business. There will be a chaperone, for god’s sake. She’s purposely made sure she’s in the latter part of their agenda, so there’s no chance Jughead can call her before adding his agent to the call.

So she might be a little bit of a coward. She’s okay with that too.

She almost misses the call thanks to the inanity of her inner monologue. When she answers, she sees a split screen of Jughead and an iron-haired man with wire frame glasses, and hears Janis Joplin’s cover of “To Love Somebody” pulsing in the background.

“Hey Betty — this is David. David—Betty Cooper, Chicago Tribune. She…ugh, give me a second. Those speakers carry farther than I thought.”

He disappears from the frame and the music grows softer, though it doesn’t disappear.

When he returns, they talk through some of the preliminaries — she gives them an idea of some of the questions she’s brainstormed over the past few days, of the pitch she and Cynthia have crafted. “We’re thinking a two-parter — the interview, and then I’ll review the ARC, and color it all with my own background in Riverdale. You know, add some human interest.”

Jughead opens his mouth to speak, but David jumps in before he can.

“That sounds perfect, Betty. In fact, Jughead mentioned you gave him his first writing job in high school — that the character of Betsy Coleman might in part have been inspired by you.” Jughead is clenching his jaw, looking as uncomfortable as Betty feels, so she averts her eyes.

“We’re thinking we’ll run extracts of the interview on J’s blog and the publisher’s website — maybe take out an ad in the Times when the publication date draws closer. We’d love to get some official photos.”

“ _No._ ” She looks up, startled at the vehemence in his voice. He runs a hand through his un-beanie-ed hair. A move that apparently still signals his exasperation. “Jesus, Dave. She just moved here. Give her a chance to build her own life before we start plastering her face all over buses.”

David’s face tells her they’ve already discussed the photos. That he is well-aware of Jughead’s opinion on the matter and is attempting to go over his head. She fights — and fails at — suppressing her urge to help, to fix, to placate.

“Maybe we can revisit that idea if the interview is well-received.”

“As you say. Well, I think that’s all on my end then. Betty, make sure your office contacts mine with the small print stuff. I’ll leave you two to set up the details. J, call me when you’ve looked over the new copy for the book jacket.”

 

“It’s not a surprise, Jughead,” she says softly when David has left the call. “I have read the book.”

“I know—I know. And I didn’t try very hard to mask the details. But you haven’t read the second one yet.”

“Well, I will soon.” She shoots for light, casual. She probably misses, if Jughead’s face is anything to go by. He’s still grinding his teeth.

The music has been getting steadily louder. “Here, I’m gonna take you with me and go outside. Jelly’s graduation is tomorrow and she’s started celebrating early.”

Of course. The music. Jellybean would be 18 now. When he settles the iPad on what she assumes is a patio table, she realizes that, though he’s in Riverdale, she actually has no idea where he is. It seems like his patio overlooks the woods.

He still knows how to read her face. “It’s—uh—a little house off Pine. For Dad and JB. The down payment seemed like a good use of my first advance.”

She feels her expression soften. It’s exactly the kind of thing he would do.

He pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and lights one up. “Look — I’ll be back on Monday night but I have some things to take care of. Would Wednesday be okay for you? Say around 8?”

“Yeah, that’ll be great.”

“Thanks. I’ll think of a good place and get in touch.” Then he looks up at something beyond the screen. “Jesus Christ. Her friends have arrived. They’re heading for the fire pit.

“I’ll talk to you soon Betty.” He’s gone before she can say goodbye. She makes a half-hearted attempt to wipe the sappy grin from her face before she calls Cynthia.


	3. In which Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones drink tequila

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m surprised Archie didn’t tell you I was moving here.”
> 
> “Yeah, well, we don’t exactly talk about you.”
> 
> It hurts. She knows it shouldn’t. She knows it makes sense. But it does. Because it sounds like ‘I don’t think about you.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As Juggie says, this chapter is a little bit meta. And pretty nerdy. I just have a lot of feelings about books, okay.  
> Also I fudged with canon a little re: Jug’s writing style. So sue me.

When the uber drops her off outside the bar Jughead selected, she buys herself some time by checking her email. She’s already spotted him inside but doesn’t know if he’s seen her, so the email-checking is a precautionary measure.

Though she wouldn’t be surprised if she had any last minute notes from her boss.

The week thus far has not been kind to her. Cynthia found out she’d twisted the truth about her and Jug’s shared history. Turns out she once dated his agent. Cynthia also loves the idea that she’s the inspiration for Jughead’s heroine and is all over the plaster-Betty’s-picture-on-the-side-of-a-bus idea train.

Betty’s feeling that particularly potent mixture of nauseous because she’s disappointed someone, nervous about seeing Jughead, and migraine-y because she’s been staring at a computer screen all day. The farther the cab had gotten from the Loop, though, the more the nerves had emerged as the heavy favorite for emotion of the night.

She forces herself not to pace as she stares at her phone screen. Public spaces. She feels more comfortable about being around him in public spaces. They’d emailed about maybe doing the interview in either of their apartments, for sake of ease. She’s not ready to see his apartment. Being on the back of his motorcycle had been overwhelming enough. She isn’t ready to saturate herself with even more of him.

The prospect of her apartment is even more terrifying. She is afraid of what he would make of her life, what details and detritus he would weave into a narrative she couldn’t control.

A public space means no home field advantage. And it means an escape hatch, if she needs it.

She can see him inside, sitting in the far corner where the bar top meets the wall. He has his laptop out and a cup of coffee at his elbow, beanie covering his hair but for the one stray curl. If not for the wall of liquor she can see to the right of him, he could be in his booth at Pop’s.

Who drinks coffee at a bar at 8 pm?

Get a hold of yourself, Cooper. If you can’t _feel_ brave, you can at least _act_ like you do.

She goes in.

 

“Hey — sorry I’m late.”

He arches an eyebrow. “You’re not. And you know it.” Well she’s not early, which is the same thing. She busies herself setting her bag down and getting arranged on the bar stool while she keeps talking.

“How was Riverdale?”

“Great. Weird. They put my book in a special display in the library at Riverdale High. No matter that I didn’t graduate from there.”

“Well, I guess the story does take place there.”

“Yeah. Anyway, JB graduated and no one cried, so gold star for the weekend. I read your piece yesterday.”

His sudden change of topic gives her whiplash, but a sudden puff of warmth smokes in her stomach at his words.

“Oh thanks, you didn’t have to.”

“You know, I actually read it before I saw the byline and I wondered why the voice was so familiar. So which one was your favorite?”

She’s a little bit dazed by the compliment and doesn’t immediately put two and two together for the question.

“Favorite what?”

“Favorite bookstore.”

“Oh, right, duh. Um, Myopic, I think. Though Bookman’s Corner was a close second.”

His eyes crinkle when he smiles. “Good choices. Myopic is one of my favorites too. Did you go into the occult section? They have an armchair in the window in that room on the second floor that overlooks Milwaukee Ave. I wrote a good forty percent of the new book from that spot.”

“No I didn’t see it, I’ll have to go back.”

“You will.” She breaks eye contact when he doesn’t, and turns to the glass of water in front of her.

“Hey, Betts.” He reaches out and touches her hand briefly before retreating. “How about a drink?”

It is by far the least professional thing she’s ever done, but she truly, completely, 100% cross-her-heart-and-hope-to-die does not believe she will make it through this evening without alcohol. As if by magic, or the power of positive thinking, the bartender sets before her something bedecked with cherries and way too colorful to taste like anything other than cough syrup.

She looks at Jughead, wondering if he’d ordered something for her before she came in. But he’s frowning at the glass. The bartender nods to a table past the bar.

“Courtesy a that guy.” They both turn to look, and a man on the far side of room is raising his glass to her. She returns the gesture and, as usual, blushes, before turning her body more fully towards Jughead and crossing her legs. He puts a hand on the back of her chair.

“What a dick. Like he can’t see we’re together. Want me to go talk to him?”

“No, I’m a big girl. I can do it myself.”

“But—”

“No, Jug. I’m not going to let the two of you grunt over me like neanderthals arguing over a piece of meat. If you go over there, he’ll think you’re my boyfriend and that’s why he’ll back off. I don’t want it to be like that. I want him to back off because I say I’m not interested, not because you say so.”

She notices him exhale forcefully.

“Besides, what if he’s my one true love. If I don’t talk to him, I’ll never find out and then I’ll die alone surrounded by cats.”

“Why, Betty Cooper, are you being sarcastic?” An impish sort of mirth springs to his eyes and it makes something ache inside her.

“It’s not like you have the market cornered. I’ll be right back.” She takes her purse to the bathroom, with a pit stop to thank the man, and manages to get away without giving him her number. She’s not sure why—he is cute—but it feels like a betrayal somehow.

When she gets back, the bartender has replaced the frou frou drink with a shot of something clear. Tequila, she thinks, because it’s accompanied by a salt shaker and a wedge of lime resting on a napkin.

“You want to do tequila shots?”

“Liquid courage, Betts,” he says, in an echo of her thoughts from earlier. For a moment she feels guilty, but she’s glad he’s nervous too.

She squints at him and takes the shot, before delicately setting the lime rind back on the napkin. When she turns back, his grin could split his face.

“You’re a bad influence, Jones.”

“Always.”

 

When the bartender has cleared away the shot glasses in favor of a Goose Island for him and a glass of wine for her, he says, “So we should probably get started?”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” She sets up the recorder, thankful it’s a Wednesday and the bar is quiet. He hits the ground running. More verbose that she remembers. Charmingly articulate. She almost wishes they were doing a podcast instead of an article.

“The sequel came as a bit of a surprise. At the end of _The Final Fissure_ , you revealed the murderer. What story is left to tell?”

“I don’t really think of _Sweetwater Subtext_ —that’s the title by the way, nailed down for sure today—Anyway, I don’t think of _Sweetwater Subtext_ as a sequel, though technically it is because some of it takes place later than _Final Fissure_. I think of them more as companions, separated by genre but connected by story. _The Final Fissure_ is more plot-driven—definitely commercial fiction. _Sweetwater Subtext_ explores more of the motivations of the characters, I’d say it’s more literary.”

“Does that mean it will alienate some of your original readership?”

“I hope not. I don’t think the genre should have anything to do with whether a story is compelling, enjoyable. I think writers—well, more likely critics—tend to underestimate readers. Preferring genre fiction like crime or romance or sci-fi doesn’t say anything about a reader’s abilities, only their interests. Readers have already developed a relationship with these characters, hopefully they care enough about them to want to know more.”

“I was surprised when I first picked up _Final Fissure_ and saw the genre. You gave up on your Philip Marlowe fantasies.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know how much hard boiled crime fiction you’ve read, but it usually doesn’t turn out well for the women. You get to college and take one theory course, and all of a sudden all you can see is the male gaze and the forced dichotomy between the ingenue and the femme fatale.

“Besides, you took over the story pretty early on and your voice—sorry, Betsy’s voice—was pretty insistent.”

Her mouth screws up at the mention of her fictional alter ego. “You just had to pick Betsy, didn’t you? Do you remember our third grade teacher called me that all year, no matter how many times me, or you, or Archie corrected her?”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I tried to call her every variation of Elizabeth there is. Eliza stuck for a while but I kept writing ‘Betts’ in spite of myself so calling her Betsy saved me a ton of rewriting and annoyed calls from my editor. Though she found other things to latch onto. She thought ‘Betsy’ was ‘too mid-century, not enough millennial.’”

Betty laughs at his air quotes. “I’ve thought that myself more than once. But you withstood the pressure?”

“Never let it be said that I don’t suffer for my art.”

He pops the toothpick that previously held her frou frou drink cherries into his mouth, and she tries hard not to fixate on the tip of his tongue as it rolls the piece of wood from tooth to tooth. Focus, Cooper. What’s next in her notes?

“One of the big changes this time around must be your relationship to your readers. Have you felt the pressure of people waiting for this story, of what they might want to happen next? Has it affected you, either in your work or in your life?”

“Obviously the story starts in your head. But as soon as it’s printed, readers make it their own. It’s a dialogue in which they define the story—and me as the author, by default—as much as by who they are as by who I am. In the case of _The Final Fissure_ , I was just trying to tell the story. Writing it was as much an act of therapy for me as it was a work of literature for everyone else. I wrote it as a teenager and then sat on it for many years, before I had the emotional distance I needed to edit it into a shape that would hold some broader appeal. This time around, it’s a little bit meta. _Sweetwater Subtext_ is the same narrator coming back to a defining event of his life, trying to understand how it’s shaped him. _Final Fissure_ was for me, but _Sweetwater Subtext_ I did write with a specific audience in mind.”

“Not the audience who’s bought and loved it?”

“No, something a bit narrower than that.”

She doesn’t quite know how to follow-up without asking him who the audience is, but that feels too intimate. So she switches gears.

“If you wrote _The Final Fissure_ in high school, and _Sweetwater Subtext_ in the last couple of years, what did you do in the meantime?”

“I wrote a lot of short fiction. Creative writing at a university pretty much runs on the short story workshop.”

“So should we be looking for a short story collection next?”

“Haha, no. I think I subjected my workshop-mates to enough of the torture that was my short fiction. And it definitely overlapped with the world of _The Final Fissure_ and _Sweetwater Subtext_. Some of it got recycled into the two books. Maybe the story of Jason Blossom’s murder is the only story I have in me. Maybe I’ll be writing about it, who I was—who we were—then, for the rest of my life, in one way or another.”

Betty’s afraid to touch the subtext of that statement with a ten-foot pole. She presses the tip of her tongue against the back of her front teeth and wills herself not to flush. Or, if she does, hopes Jug will attribute it to the alcohol.

“Okay…so if the story is basically the same, how else was the writing experience different this time around?”

“In some ways, I think _Sweetwater Subtext_ might have been harder to write — I’ve read _The Final Fissure_ so many times but I also lived it. I’m not sure how to separate fact from fiction, I’m not sure if I know the difference. _Sweetwater Subtext_ is much more internal, there’s much more room for error, interpretation.”

“Did your routine change? Anything in the physical process of how you wrote?”

“Definitely. Being an established author has conveyed a huge privilege on me. _The Final Fissure_ was written in spare time at school or late nights at the diner. I’m still a nighttime writer. I still can’t write at home, I need people around me to observe. But writing gets to be the focus of my day now. I’ve also gotten better at letting other people see my writing. As a teenager, I was obsessive about making it perfect first.”

“Oh I remember.” They’re both facing ahead, so the recorder has a better angle, but she can see him smiling at her out of the corners of her eyes.

“But now, sometimes it’s just get it on the page and send it off, especially if I’m under a deadline. Still, though, I like some feedback if only to reaffirm my own conviction that I’m headed in the right direction. Actually, Archie looked at a few chapters of _Sweetwater Subtext_ pretty early on.”

“Really? I can’t see him as a particularly dedicated editor.”

Jughead’s laugh is big, his head is thrown back and his shoulders shake. “No, definitely not. But it was more feedback on the content I was looking for, than the style. Whether I was crossing a line with anything.”

“Well, color me intrigued.”

“Good.”

She takes a risk. “I’m surprised Archie didn’t tell you I was moving here.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t exactly talk about you.”

It hurts. She knows it shouldn’t. She knows it makes sense. But it does. Because it sounds like ‘I don’t think about you.’

“Right, obviously. That was stupid of me.” Way to ruin it, Betty. “On a related note, what do you owe to the real people upon whom you base your characters?”

“That’s a question I’ve been wrestling with. The best answer I’ve been able to come up with, insufficient as it is, is honesty.”


	4. In which Jughead Jones turns the tables

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She pulls the hair tie off her wrist and moves to put her hair up, then lets it slide out of her hands when it’s shorter than she expects. She knows she has enough material, knows this is going to be good, but she doesn’t want to stop. She feels drunk off Jughead’s words, like she’s a teenager sneaking champagne at a cousin’s wedding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is just a continuation of the previous scene because it got too long, so I reprinted the end of it if you don’t remember :)

(Previously on Second City:

“Did your routine change? Anything in the physical process of how you wrote?”

“Definitely. Being an established author has conveyed a huge privilege on me. _The Final Fissure_ was written in spare time at school or late nights at the diner. I’m still a nighttime writer. I still can’t write at home, I need people around me to observe. But writing gets to be the focus of my day now. I’ve also gotten better at letting other people see my writing. As a teenager, I was obsessive about making it perfect first.”

“Oh I remember.” They’re both facing ahead, so the recorder has a better angle, but she can see him smiling at her out of the corners of her eyes.

“But now, sometimes it’s just get it on the page and send it off, especially if I’m under a deadline. Still, though, I like some feedback if only to reaffirm my own conviction that I’m headed in the right direction. Actually, Archie looked at a few chapters of _Sweetwater Subtext_ pretty early on.”

“Really? I can’t see him as a particularly dedicated editor.”

Jughead’s laugh is big, his head is thrown back and his shoulders shake. “No, definitely not. But it was more feedback on the content I was looking for, than the style. Whether I was crossing a line with anything.”

“Well, color me intrigued.”

“Good.”

She takes a risk. “I’m surprised Archie didn’t tell you I was moving here.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t exactly talk about you.” It hurts. She knows it shouldn’t. She knows it makes sense. But it does. Because it sounds like ‘I don’t think about you.’

“Right, obviously. That was stupid of me.” Way to ruin it, Betty. “On a related note, what do you owe to the real people upon whom you base your characters?”

“That’s a question I’ve been wrestling with. The best answer I’ve been able to come up with, insufficient as it is, is honesty.”)

 

She manages to recover, even somewhat gracefully. They speed through the rest of her questions. She barely has to look at her notes, except as an excuse to break eye contact when the butterflies get too intense. She realizes, wounded pride aside, that she’s actually having _fun_.

“Okay, let’s get back to _Sweetwater Subtext_ for a second. As we’ve said, _The Final Fissure_ had an obvious ending point with the reveal of the murderer. I know you can’t give me any spoilers, but what’s next for these characters? Will there be a third entry in this series?”

“Unclear.” She lifts her eyes to his and they seem to burn into her, like he’s trying to tell her something she’s afraid to translate.

“Oh. Um, okay. Any idea what does come next then?”

“Well, _The Final Fissure_ is gonna be a TV show. We’re still working out if I’m going to be involved, though right now I’m leaning no.”

She pulls the hair tie off her wrist and moves to put her hair up, then lets it slide out of her hands when it’s shorter than she expects. She knows she has enough material, knows this is going to be good, but she doesn’t want to stop. She feels drunk off Jughead’s words, like she’s a teenager sneaking champagne at a cousin’s wedding.

He interrupts her while she’s still formulating her next question. “Would you mind if we took a break? I could use some food.”

“Oh of course, I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize, I was just on a roll earlier and skipped dinner.”

“Jughead Jones voluntarily skipped a meal?”

“I wouldn’t call it voluntary. Sometimes the muse is actually a slave driver.”

It’s now closing in on 11, which means the dinner menu has been replaced by the late night menu, so they order baskets of a variety of fried things.

“I didn’t mean it like that earlier. It’s just, I don’t know, I think it would be kind of weird if me and Archie talked about you. That whole same-ex-girlfriend thing.”

Betty lets out a soft sigh. “Sometimes I even forget we dated. It was such a weird, hazy time in my life. I fought so hard for so long to be my own person, not Polly’s sister or Alice’s daughter. By the time senior year came around, I was tired of fighting everyone’s expectations. Veronica was back in New York, you were on the south side. We were the only two left, of the core four, and it just made sense, you know? So we went to the back to school dance together, and then homecoming, and then winter formal. And before you know it was prom and we’d been dating for eight months.”

“I always thought you two would get married and have the 2.5 kids and white picket fence thing. You know, even when we were dating, I think I thought that in the back of my mind.”

She rolls her eyes. “I know. It wasn’t in the back of your mind. I seem to recall a certain speech in a certain red-headed person’s garage at a certain other person’s birthday party.”

“God, I’m never going to live that one down. Once I managed to go an entire eleven months without thinking about it, and then the memory just crept back in. _Here, Jughead, you think you’re making progress on your social skills, well remember this?_ ”

Betty laughs. “Well that was never in the cards for me and Archie, and I didn’t want it to be. Dating him was just…comforting you know? Comfortable. And I could really use that then.”

“Do me a favor and promise me that you will never tell Archie that. You guys may be best friends and he may be ass over elbows for Veronica now, but no guy wants to know that sex with him was just comfortable.”

She holds up a pinkie and waits for Jughead to take it. “I promise.”

 

“I was surprised, when I walked into Mary’s and found you.”

“I had gathered that. Though you were probably no more surprised than I was.”

“What made you decide to move?”

Betty exhales, nervous about answering truthfully but wanting to nonetheless. “I was just so sick of New York, sick of my job. I was running on a cycle of adrenaline—benzodiazepines—caffeine—melatonin that was unsustainable. I got home from a stakeout one morning at 5 am and I realized I was doing important things for other people, breaking big stories, but as a result I missed out on doing important things for myself. I was making decisions I otherwise wouldn’t have made.

“Then I got a call from Cynthia—my editor—offering me the job here. It was a _deus ex machina_ , just what I needed at just the right time dropped out of the sky. It felt like a good time to pull the rug out from under myself. To look for a new dream.”

She’d worked so hard to get to a place where _could_ break those big stories, doing the investigative journalism she’d always wanted. But it wasn’t what she’d imagined it would be.

“And that’s okay, you know? I feel like the hardest part is telling other people, people who knew me then. Like I’m afraid they’re going to think I’ve compromised, but I’m happy. Dreams change. Well, at least for most of us,” she ends by nudging him with her elbow.

Jughead looks at her like he believes her, like he doesn’t pity her.

“I think you probably filled your quota of breaking big stories before you even left high school. I’m glad you realized you weren’t happy and did something about it.” He pauses and takes a big breath. “And I’m glad you’re here. Glad we could do this.”

She smiles at him, the corners of her lips curving down. “Me too.”

Time for a change of topic. “Polly said Jellybean works at Pop’s now.”

“Yeah, for about a year.”

“Does that mean you get free burgers?”

“No. Only half-price. But yeah, she mentioned last week that Polly and your mom come in sometimes with the twins.”

Betty can’t help the goofy grin that breaks out at the mention of her niece and nephew. “Yeah. Her and my mom have gotten a lot closer the past couple years. Since my dad died.”

“Oh, Betts, I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright. He’d been sick for a while. We…made our peace with it. With each other. But you know what’s sick? My mom’s been happier since. Like thirty fucking years and I’m pretty sure they were both miserable almost the whole time. How do you get to the point where it’s not even worth trying to go after happiness?”

“Sometimes you fall into a pattern that isn’t worth the effort it would take to break. Not everyone is as brave as you. I’m certainly not. And they had other things they were living for. Polly. You. I think that’s something I’ve learned since FP got out. My mom died, too, before— well, before. I think that’s that one thing that really fucked my dad up. That he didn’t get a chance to make it right with her. I’m sure it’s why he’s been a model citizen ever since.”

“No, Juggie. He was always so proud of you. I’m sure it’s for you. For what you’ve done for him, and for Jellybean.”

 

“Did Archie ever tell you about Thanksgiving our sophomore year of college?”

“No. That’s the first one he spent here, right?”

“Right. Mary and Mike had just moved in together, in the house they’re in now. I don’t think he was quite ready to see Mommy share a room with someone other than Daddy. Over the course of the morning, his face got redder and redder until it matched his hair. Then, when we were about to sit down for dinner, he flipped out and somehow wound up spraying mashed potatoes all over the table.”

“What! Oh no!” Years later and Betty feels the burgeoning heat of secondary embarrassment for her best friend.

“Yeah, it was great. Mary locked him outside.”

“I would have too.”

“And while all that was going down, I was upstairs, face timing with Jelly, who was still in Ohio then. I came down to Archie outside, Mary crying, and food everywhere.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, after we cleaned up the worst of it, Mike and I ate like nothing was wrong. Archie and Mary made up after a few hours. I never did get any mashed potatoes though.”

“Obviously the worst part. Oh god, the twins had been in their terrible threes that year. I spent the whole day going back and forth refereeing their screaming and then my parents’.”

“Mine’s worse.”

“It is. Which means I will get us the next round of drinks.”

“That is an offer you will never hear me turn down.” Her heart stops when he smiles at her, one dark curl dropping in front of his face.

 

She lifts her empty water glass up and twists it back and forth in her fingers, swishing the melting ice cubes around. He looks at her upturned palm for a beat too long, and she realizes he’s looking for her half-moon scars.

“I don’t do that anymore. I…haven’t since college.”

“Can I ask what made you stop?”

“I had to de-escalate. It didn’t work at first. I just switched to picking at my skin—my nails or acne or scabs. I still have pretty bad scars on my shoulders. But when I got to college, I was able to see a therapist who my mom couldn’t interrogate so that helped. She told me to hold an ice cube when I have the urge to do something destructive.” She doesn’t know why she’s telling him all of this, but for the simple fact that he seems to genuinely want to know.

“An ice cube?”

“Yeah, to cup it in the palm of my hand. Anyway, I’m a work in progress.” She’s been looking at her hand, but she switches to his face. “Wait. How did this turn into you interviewing me?”

“Well technically we’re still on our dinner break.”

“Okay, whatever.” She turns the recorder back on and asks him a few more perfunctory questions about release dates and promotional schedules. His answers are just as perfunctory, so his must be too.

“I should probably go home soon.” He just stares at her. When she begins to pack up the recorder and her notes, he snaps out of it and signals to the bartender to bring their check.

When it comes, he moves to take it but she swipes it before he can. “Nope.” She pops the p. “My interview, my expense report.”

Outside, he tries to convince her to let him take her home again, but she refuses. “I can expense the uber too and my house is way out of your way this time.”

He tries to argue with her, but she stands her ground. She believes him when he says he’s fine to ride but that doesn’t mean she wants him on the road any longer than he has to be.

He takes her phone out of her hand and minimizes the uber app. “Fine, then text me so I know you got home safe?”

She agrees and lets him hand her into the car when it comes. Then, as she turns to look at him out of the rear window, she realizes he’s given her his phone number.

 

When she gets home, she texts him: “home and locked in where the bad guys can’t get me.”

He responds with: “don’t forget to check under the bed. sleep tight, betts.”

She locks the deadbolt, then turns to lean against the door, her phone pressed to chest. _Fuck._ This isn’t good. She should feel awkward. She should feel the weight of delayed embarrassment at her reckless oversharing of her life. But she doesn’t.

Instead, she listens to the tape while she washes her face, flosses her teeth. She only gets through the first half an hour to forty-five minutes before she’s too tired to pay attention anymore, but she can already tell it’s good. It’ll be the best thing she’s ever written. The last thing she thinks before she falls asleep is that he’s always brought out the best in her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my brain, they have three drinks over a period of 4-5 hours, so Jughead is fine to ride the mile or so from the bar to his house. I even calculated it and his peak BAC without food is .046.


	5. In which Betty Cooper remembers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On Wednesday, they drink tequila. On Thursday, Mary calls to invite her to their weekly Friday night family dinner with Jughead. The timing makes her suspect he may have had something to do with the invitation. She wonders if they’re becoming friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently I'm obsessed with writing about forms of transportation.

On Wednesday, they drink tequila. On Thursday, Mary calls to invite her to their weekly Friday night family dinner with Jughead. The timing makes her suspect he may have had something to do with the invitation. She wonders if they’re becoming friends.

By Friday afternoon, she’s finished transposing the interview and has begun making notes for the story. Currently, she’s switching back and forth between the printed-out transcript, covered in colorful scribbles of half-lines and sentences that came to her that morning on the L, and the word document where’s she’s attempting to put those half-lines and sentences into some sort of order that will open the piece.

She waffles over including the line, “FP Jones is the kind of man who spends his first advance—the first significant amount of money he’s ever had in his life—on a house for his dad and his little sister.”

It’s a great line. It sheds light on his background and his character. It’s relevant to the continuously floated questions on the blurred boundary between fact and fiction in Jughead’s work. It’s a line she, and maybe _only_ she, can walk, having lived through the murder and its aftermath with him. But it’s a line on which she treads lightly. She has no interest in exposing them. She’s already begun the mental math of figuring out just how little of herself she can keep in the piece while maintaining the integrity of the pitch.

Betty deletes the sentence.

She may have a duty as a journalist but she also has a duty to the sacred weight of the shared history they carry. It is not a secret that is hers to tell. It may have been said in the course of business meeting—thereby formally on the record—but Jughead had been so earnest and vulnerable in that moment, she wants to keep it to herself, to hoard it like the piece of gold that it is.

Then she leaves work early, telling herself it’s so she can beat rush hour on the red line. But still, she stops at the French Market and picks up a tiramisu to contribute to dinner and then swings by home to trade her grubby pencil skirt and blazer for a light linen dress.

 

When she arrives that evening, she spends the first few minutes alone with Mary in the kitchen, catching up. After they’ve run through the past few weeks of Betty’s life, with the brief pitstop on the surreality that was Wednesday, Mary’s eyes flick down to Betty’s left hand and back up to her face.

“No regrets thus far?”

“No regrets.”

 

Then, she puts a glass of wine in Betty’s hand and shoos her into the living room, where Jughead is FaceTiming with Archie.

“Betty!” Archie extends the ‘y’ in her name into an ‘ay’ sound—a sign he’s either drunk or happy to see her. Tonight, she’s pretty sure it’s the latter.

“Hey Arch!”

He is notoriously bad at responding to texts and emails, and his schedule is so different from hers that they’ve only FaceTimed once since her move.

In order to fit both her and Jughead’s faces on the iPad screen, they are pressed together on Mary’s two-seater couch. He balances his arm on one knee so the camera is more angled toward her, so she and Archie can catch up. The other stretches along the cushion behind her. She is hyper aware of the long muscles of his thigh, where they bunch and release, pressed against her own. But then Archie says something that is so very typically Archie, and Jughead catches her eye and smiles, and it feels like an inside joke. The years melt away. They are twelve and sitting in a treehouse in the Andrews’s background. Archie reads comic books. Betty and Jughead read _To Kill a Mockingbird_.

Eventually, Veronica pops into the screen over Archie’s shoulder and joins the conversation. Betty’s glad to see her. They’ve been talking since last fall too, tentatively rebuilding the promising friendship they’d once had.

“Jughead, Archie, go away. I need to talk to Betty.” Jughead rolls his eyes but complies, handing her the iPad before he slips away.

“What’s up, Veronica?”

“B, please tell me you’re tapping that.” Betty nearly drops the iPad. She can see Jughead through the front window, knows he’s joined Mike, knows he can’t hear them, but she feels her palms begin to sweat nonetheless.

“Oh my god. You can’t just say that. What if he hadn’t left the room yet?”

“So what if he hadn’t? Look, I know he was dreamy in high school, but Look. At. Him. Now. I can almost forgive him for still wearing that damn beanie sometimes.”

“It’s not happening, Veronica. I don’t even think we’re friends. This is only the third time I’ve seen him since I moved here.”

“You just told Archie you spent five hours in a bar two days ago talking.”

“Yeah for my _job_. I was interviewing him.”

“Do you normally drink tequila at a bar with your interviewees?”

“No but I also don’t normally interview people who’ve previously stomped all over my heart.”

“Oh, Betty.”

“Don’t ‘oh Betty’ me. You didn’t see. You went back to New York. Jughead left me. There’s no way he still has feelings for me. And if he did, that would be crazy. It’s been _years_ , Ron.”

“Please. That boy looked at you like you hung the moon when you were 15 and from what I just saw, he still does.” Betty’s reminded of a conversation they once had in the hallway at Riverdale High, when she and Jughead had just started dating. Ronnie called him Holden Caulfield. She is just as sincere now.

“It doesn’t matter. He walked away. He picked the Serpents over me.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll drop it. Weird vibes with Jughead aside and I know you had Hunter, but—Look, I just wanted to make absolutely sure I’m not stepping on any toes. You know I don’t have the best track record with that.”

“You’re definitely, definitely not, V. Even if you were, I’m pretty sure I ceded any claim I had when I moved halfway across the country. Archie and I did try dating once and it was so weird.”

Ronnie exhales, “Good, that’s what he said. I really like him.”

“And he really likes you.”

“So tell me about Mary and her boyfriend. They’re coming for a visit in a few weeks and I want her to like me. I only met her that one time after Fred was shot and obviously that didn’t go well what with my dad and then moving back to New York right after.”

“All Mary wants is for Archie to be happy. She knows better than anyone that he’s usually the one tripping himself up when it comes to that, especially with girls. You guys will get along fine. And Mike is the sweetest man in the world. Just don’t try to tell him that New York pizza is better than Chicago pizza.”

“I don’t know if I can promise that, on principle.”

“Okay, your funeral. Also. Kevin texted me he’s gonna be in the city from LA in a few weeks for work. I mentioned you and he wanted to know if you wanted to get coffee.”

“Oh my god yes! Text me his number. I’m so excited.”

 

She can’t shake the sense that she’s somehow entered a time warp. All of a sudden, Veronica and Jughead are back in her life. All of a sudden, she’s sitting down to a family dinner with cloth napkins and people are passing dishes. It’s not _her_ family, there seems to be none of the Cooper brand of dysfunction in sight, and yet, with Jughead across from her, it’s impossible not to remember. She accepts the platter of green beans Mary is handing her and forces her mind to the here and now.

“So Jug, are you coming to the Cubs game with us next week?”

“What? No. I don’t sports.”

Betty feels her mouth drop open. “You’re the one who told me I couldn’t take the L that first night because of the game.”

“Yeah but that was about avoiding drunk bros. If you wanna take public transportation in Chicago in the summer, you gotta know when the baseball games begin and end.”

Mary laughs and Mike adds, “I’ve gotten him to a game or two. Only ever when Archie’s in town though.”

Betty smiles at Mike. “Guess I’m just not special enough.” She means it as a joke, but when she turns back, Jughead is staring down at his plate.

 

Mary and Mike had refused point blank to allow them to help with clean up. So instead, they’re leaning against the back porch railing. Jughead is smoking, Betty swirling the dregs of the wine in her glass, when she screws up her courage. “How’d you get out, Jug?”

“What?”

“The Serpents. You were in a gang. Teenage gang members don’t usually wind up with full rides to tier one colleges.”

“You’ve been talking to Mary.” He pulls off his beanie and runs a hand through his hair. “FP found out after a while and lost his shit. He managed to get a hold of my foster parents from prison and all of a sudden, junior year, I was being escorted to and from school. It let up after his trial, but he also reamed out the Serpents. So that was sort of it for my career as a gang banger.”

“Oh, that’s why you disappeared for a while.”

“Disappeared?”

“I mean I stopped seeing you around town. And then when I did again…”

“You were with Archie.”

“Yeah, and you were with that other blonde girl.”

“Sabrina.”

“Yeah. I would get this quick little pang when I would see you around town, at Pop’s or with Sabrina, I always thought it was regret that I’d let our friendship die along with our relationship.” As soon as the words are out of her mouth she wants to inhale and suck them right back in. But she can’t. They hover for a moment, then she overcorrects. “I mean, we drifted apart and eventually we both moved on. We should have been able to still be friends.”

“It wasn’t like that with Sabrina, you know. She had a boyfriend. Harley? Harvey? I don’t know. Last I heard they’d just gotten back together.”

“No I didn’t know.”

They stand in silence for a while.

“I regretted it too. That we lost our friendship as well. That I lost both of your friendships.”

Again, her mouth ruins it. “Yeah well, you’re the one who walked away.”

“What? Betty, I didn’t — okay. Yeah. I did.”

“And you didn’t come back.”

“There was still shit going on, Betts. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”

“Why not? If not the Serpents, what else?” Okay, so they’re doing this.

“Even if I wasn’t a member anymore the Serpents were still a factor. They were still my friends. My dad was still in jail. We were still in the middle of a fucking civil war. We’d already been threatened, and not just with the pig’s blood.”

“Please. No one threatened me beyond Chuck and his usual douchebaggery.”

“Not true.”

“Oh yeah, who was the big threat? And why don’t I know about it?”

His posture goes rigid, and he flicks away the cigarette butt, which still has a while to go before it’s burnt out. “Ah—no. You’re right, you weren’t. I’m misremembering. I must have just been thinking about something else Chuck did.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.” But a muscle pulses in his jaw.

“Fine, whatever. Don’t tell me. I suppose I’ve gone this long not knowing.”

“Betty.”

“I’m going to go help with dessert.”

 

 

It wasn’t dramatic, until the end. He washed away from her like waves on the sand, receding bit by bit until she looked up and he was gone.

 

Her memory is cinematic. Impersonal. (Her therapist said that defamiliarizing had been an emergency tactic on behalf of her brain to cope with the trauma.)

It had been uncharacteristically cool that July. More days than not, fog rolled in off of Sweetwater River in the early morning and lingered into the night. That night, though—the worst night—the sky was clear.

When she walked out of Pop’s, Archie and Kevin trailing behind her (Veronica already long gone back into the glittering arms of Manhattan), Jughead had been waiting for her. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sight by then. His body, a long column of black from his boots to the jacket that clung to his back like a scar to the windblown hair atop his head, silhouetted against the chrome of the motorcycle. When she bounced up, she remembers, she’d tried to force back the smile that had dropped off her face upon seeing him. He pulled away from her kiss.

Something had been wrong for weeks and no amount of wheedling or cajoling could unearth it. There would be days that felt like normal, felt like before a social worker and a leather jacket had come between them.

(This is her post-mortem diagnosis. She doesn’t remember any problems until the end of the school year. She liked his new friends. Liked hanging out at the garage where the Serpents congregated. Loved the happiness and comfort he seemed to find there. Loved the newfound confidence with which he walked, with which he touched her. But half the summer gone and they were done, and the only things she could point to, only concrete things she could finger, were the social worker and the leather jacket from the autumn before.)

The frequency of the normal days receded like the sunlight that hid from the fog that summer. On the other days, the more common days, silence sat awkward between them and a look would come into his eyes that had no explanation.

Eventually, her memory drowned out the specific words Jughead had chosen to break her heart and what she’d said in return. She remembers standing outside herself and seeing her scream, watching him ride away, staring at the blood pooling her palms.

Worse than the night her father died. Worse than the night she returned her engagement ring. She screamed at him until her throat was raw and snot dribbled off her chin. But he’d stood there, still as a column.

She doesn’t remember his words, but she remembers his metaphor. Their lives had torn like fabric and no amount of careful stitching could hide the seam. They had changed, he had changed. It would be easier on them both to just end it now.

She remembers, no matter the words he said, that what he meant was, “I don’t love you anymore.”

She didn’t believe him then. But when he stayed away, when he didn’t answer her texts or calls, when he didn’t come the night she cried into his voicemail until it wouldn’t accept any more messages, or any of the nights thereafter, she began to accept that he’d told her the truth.

(The next thing she remembers clearly, the next memory that’s free from fog, is waking up in Archie’s twin bed the morning after senior homecoming.)

 

 

They don’t make eye contact over their tiramisu. And after, when Mike has asked Jughead if he wants to head downstairs to work for a while and Jug has accepted, when she knows he can’t follow her, Betty excuses herself.

She is too tired to stand on the train platform and studiously avoid the eyes of lecherous drunks, to cling to the pole and pretend to listen to the rambling of the people who ride the train one end to another and back again, to pay attention so she doesn’t miss her stop. She has spent far too much money on ubers so far this month, but tonight she doesn’t hesitate.

Construction on the north side means he takes her down Lake Shore Drive.

She opens the window and lets the wind buffet her face until it brings tears to her eyes. She doesn’t blink and the tears blur the stars that hang suspended over the deep, dark blue that merges lake and sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *hides behind table*


	6. In which Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke make an appearance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” floats out of the speakers in the corner. Jughead’s back is to her. He’s leaning over a table and a patch of sweat outlines the curves of his shoulder blades. She makes it to within eight feet of him before he notices the sound of her steps and turns around. He’s wearing yellow safety glasses. Behind them, he looks surprised. Wary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mary Andrews’s house has become the de facto setting for this story. I don’t know how or why, but I’m rolling with it.

On a Saturday afternoon in early July, Betty has just ended a call with Polly when Jughead Jones lets himself into the kitchen.

Not her kitchen, of course. Mary and Mike are in New York, so Betty is house/cat/plant-sitting. Well, really, she’s here to use Mike’s restaurant-style kitchen—she’s kitchen-sitting?

So Jughead walking in isn’t the heart attack-inducing surprise it would otherwise be. But it is enough to make her drop the wooden spoon she’d been holding, red sauce splattering across the floor.

He doesn’t notice her at first, as he backs in, arms full and headphones on. But a moment later he turns to close the door with his butt, and sees her crouched on the floor next to the stove, spoon in hand.

“Betty?” The headphones brush his hair back as he pulls them off.

“Ah, hi Jug. What are you doing here?”

“Taking advantage of my two friends being out of town and using their awesome house.” He lifts the box a little, as if to gesture at it, and she can see thin pieces of wood sticking out of the top.

“Right. Well, they asked me to housesit. Or, okay, I offered cause have you seen this kitchen?” For a moment, her enthusiasm overwhelms the small-animal-in-headlights terror that had paralyzed her when he’d come in. She gushes, then clams up.

“Yeah it’s nice.”

She stands and turns to rinse the spoon, her spine more rigid than normal as their most recent interaction replays itself in her memory.

While her back is still turned, he says, “Look, if Mary and Mike asked you to be here, I can go. It’s no problem.”

“No, no. You have just as much right to be here as I do. More, even. We can…coexist. I mean, unless you’re planning on cooking, it’s not like we want the same things.” She waves the spoon toward the box he’d dropped on the island.

“Yeah, okay, you’re right. Then I’ll just…” He acquiesces, and, as on the first night, disappears into the basement with an awkward wave of his hand.

Only when he’s gone does she realize he wasn’t wearing his beanie.

 

She’d been berating herself since the Disastrous Dinner, as she thinks of it—alliteratively and in capitals. Her only excuse is that Veronica had flustered her, had brought to the fore things she’d long since buried.

Which is the problem, really. That she’d _buried_ them at all. She thought she’d exorcised them, the anger, the resentment, the fear of abandonment. But apparently not. Apparently, deep in some dusty corner of her heart, she’d held on. And those feelings had ignited, affronted at the prospect of Betty Cooper once again having a crush on Jughead Jones.

But none of that is his fault. And she intends on telling him so.

First, though: lasagna.

The sauce she’d made with an early crop of tomatoes from the farmer’s market had only just begun to simmer when Jug had interrupted her. The pasta dough is almost finished chilling, and the ricotta is ready to move from the cheesecloth-lined strainer to the fridge.

Between the wonderfully mind-numbing nature of the task in front of her and intermittent texts from both Polly and Kevin, Betty spends a pleasant couple of hours, with only momentary pricks of conscience when she remembers Jughead is a floor below her, similarly engaged.

After she has texted a photo of the tray to Kevin, popped it in the oven and set the timer, and done a thorough wipe-down of the kitchen, she stops in the bathroom briefly to make sure there’s no flour on her nose. Then she tightens her ponytail and opens the basement door.

 

Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” floats out of the speakers in the corner. Jughead’s back is to her. He’s leaning over a table and a patch of sweat outlines the curves of his shoulder blades. She makes it to within eight feet of him before he notices the sound of her steps and turns around. He’s wearing yellow safety glasses. Behind them, he looks surprised. Wary.

“Hi, um, are you busy? I wanted to talk to you.”

“No, not really. What’s up?” He tosses the glasses onto the table behind him and then leans against it, arms crossed in front of his chest.

She’s rehearsed what she wants to say so it comes out in a rush. “I just wanted to apologize to you. About before. You don’t owe me an explanation. You had every right to break up with me. We were in high school. That’s what people in high school do.” And it is. She’s right. She rolls her hands up in the hem of her t-shirt. The moment in which she waits for him to respond feels interminable.

“Thanks, I guess, though you don’t have to apologize. But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry too. I may have had a right to, but I definitely didn’t go about it in a very good way.”

“Friends, then? I’d really like us to be friends.” Like an idiot, she extends a hand for him to shake. He takes it and shakes once, up and down, before dropping it.

“Friends. Definitely friends.”

“So…what are you doing?”

He makes a face that gets caught halfway between a grin and a grimace. “Well, the plan was to work on putting together the roll-top part of the roll-top desk. You know, the part that retracts like a bread box? But I’m not having much luck so I’ve just been fiddling around with some decorative bits. He holds up something that looks like a particularly fancy piece of latticework. “It’s whittling really.”

She reaches out to touch the wood in his hand. “It’s beautiful.”

He goes a bit pink at her praise. “Thanks. I want to add these into the— well, there are these slots in the hutch for mail and papers and stuff. And I was going to try to make these into little doors for some of them.” Betty must look lost because he adds, “Here, I can show you.”

He pulls out his phone and scrolls for a minute before handing it to her. The differences between the photo and the desk in front of her couldn’t be more stark, even to Betty, who knows literally nothing about building furniture. To her, the before photo looks like something from a salvage yard or an HGTV show before picture.

“This is amazing, Jug. You’ve done all of this?”

“With Mike’s help, yeah. Honestly, he’s probably done most of it. I knew next to nothing before we started.”

“Can you show me? Can I help somehow?”

That seems to be the right thing to say. A smile lights up his face for an instant before he turns back to face the table, beckoning her forward. “Right now I’m hand smoothing the edges of the fretwork from the scroll saw. We outsourced this part and the kids who did it didn’t do the best job, so I want to make sure there aren’t gonna be any splinters hanging off.”

He hands her a delicate-looking piece of latticed wood and small knife. “You just cut away any bits that your finger would catch on, then go in with some sand paper and smooth it out.” She tries.

He looks surprised. “You’re so good at that.”

“Small hands.”

“Right. Okay, can you work on that then? And I’ll go back to staining the main piece.”

“Sure, no problem.”

They work in peace for a while, interrupted only by Betty’s occasional questions and Leonard Cohen’s gravelly tones.

Between the rhythmic work of whittling and sanding—which she’s focusing on, she really is. She knows better than to half-pay attention when holding onto what’s basically a knife—but between that, her glance flickers over to Jughead, where he’s sweeping a rag over the side of the desk. She is thankful he accepted her apology, that he does seem to want to be friends. But she’s also thankful for the overheated basement, walnut wood stain, and the hard cut of his triceps where they pop out as he works.

The timer on the phone in her back pocket goes off and she drops the knife.

“Oh, dinner’s ready!” She runs up the stairs, then stops to lean over the railing. “Come up, Jug. I made so much.”

Jughead follows her upstairs and watches silently as she pulls the pan out, sets it on the stovetop, and waves an oven mitt over it. She begins rummaging in cabinets, looking for plates and silverware. She’s babbling about something she isn’t totally conscious of as she goes up on her toes and reaches for a salad bowl. She doesn’t realize he’s come up behind her until she feels one hand settle on her waist, and the other comes into her field of vision as he gets the bowl for her. Before she can process, he’s moved back and is taking the stack of plates into the dining room.

 

“Betty. This is amazing.”

“Thank you.”

“No I mean seriously. Like, I would pay you to make this for me so I could freeze it and eat it forever.”

She laughs. “Hunter always said it was better the next day cold for breakfast.”

“I’ll remember that.” He takes another bite and swallows, then, “Hunter is?”

“Oh. My ex-fiancé.”

“Ah.” She thinks something half-formed about them having so much in common—the same taste in pasta dishes and in women, but before it can get out of her mouth, he saves her.

“But seriously. I’d even take the recipe. If my butchered version of it came out even a third as good, I’d still be happy.”

“You can have the recipe, but the real secret is the homemade pasta.”

“That may be above my skill level, but I’m sure I can find fresh pasta somewhere.”

“Yeah, definitely.”

He eats three pieces of lasagna, as well as garlic bread and even a little salad. Some things don’t change.

When he pulls on a strand of his hair for what she estimates is the tenth time since they sat down, her curiosity finally gets the best of her.

“What happened to your hat?”

His eyes dart away from her face and he looks uncomfortable. “Nothing, it’s at home. I don’t wear it most of the time anymore.” That might be true. He’d worn it at dinner and at the bar, but he hadn’t when he arrived the first night, though he’d had it with him. And she’s only seen him a handful of times in the past couple months, let alone the last several years, so she supposes she isn’t in any place to judge.

“It’s basically my security blanket. For when I’m feeling off-kilter.” Oh. So she made him feel off-kilter? Like good off-kilter or like I can’t wait to get away from you off-kilter?

“I actually didn’t even have it in Chicago with me until recently. I saw it in my room in Riverdale and grabbed it more out of nostalgia than anything.” He smiles at her, a little sheepish.

As he speaks, her mind flips through images like cards, images of homes he’s had—a sleeping bag on Archie’s bedroom floor, the twin bed in the small room in his foster family’s house, the janitor’s closet at school that she’d convinced him to show her once, after the fact. It lands on the rickety bed in FP’s trailer. Then she remembers the trailer is gone. He has a room in a small house off Pine instead. One she’s never seen and can’t imagine.

It’s weird. They’re navigating waters in which they’re close and yet not close. The estrangement of their adult lives belies the intimacy they shared as children, and as teenagers for that brief, tumultuous time. She knows him so well and, yet, knows nothing about him since he rode away from her that night. His expressions, his hand gestures, are familiar but so much of the man making them, the history that built him, is not.

“Can I ask about Hunter?”

“Oh, sure. There’s no big story. It just…wasn’t meant to be.”

He makes a gesture with his fork, as if asking her to continue.

She shrugs and sets her own fork down before leaning back in her chair. “We met in college. For some reason, the editor of the paper wanted me to try my hand at the sports section. So I covered a lacrosse game where he got hit in the face.”

Jughead’s mouth gapes like a fish for a second. “Lacrosse. His name was Hunter and he played lacrosse? No, Betty. No way. Does he model for J.Crew too? Wait—tell me he works in finance.”

“Stop it. Honestly, when I look back on it now — he definitely seems more like the kind of guy Veronica would go for, not me. Or Kevin. Kevin definitely had a crush on him for a while when we first started dating. But yeah. I loved him, I think. I just realized I didn’t love him enough to marry him.” It’s a bit of a cop out answer, but Jughead doesn’t push.

“Any girls in your life?”

“No one worth mentioning. Not now, anyway.” Also a cop out, but she’ll give him the same courtesy he gave her.

She pulls her ponytail down, rubbing her temples before moving to pull at the muscles of her neck. Her body is no longer used to the strain the hairstyle causes and she’d been hunching over the whittling earlier.

“Feeling stiff?”

“Yeah a little.”

“Sorry, I definitely gave you the harder job. Do you want some advil? I know where Mary keeps it—I can get it before I head home.”

“Sure, if you don’t mind.”

She moves back into the kitchen to clean up, where Jughead finds her when he comes back downstairs.

“Any idea why Mary left this on the sink in the bathroom?” He hands her a cellophane-wrapped gift basket and a card, her name in slanting cursive across the front.

She peruses the contents and smiles. “A thank you gift for looking after the house.”

The basket is filled with little Bath and Body Works bottles — a lotion, a soap, a candle. All in eucalyptus spearmint, the scent she wore in high school. Well this explained Archie’s weirdly thoughtful gift-giving while they’d been dating — his mom’s help.

She opens the hand lotion and rubs some on, breathing deeply and letting some tension flow out with the exhale.

“It smells like a person I used to be.” He moves closer to her so he can smell it too, close enough that she could reach out and touch his face.

“It smells like Friday nights in the cab of FP’s truck, driving you home.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

He is looking at her in a way that’s familiar but also vaguely uncomfortable. He looks at her like he really truly sees her, and she realizes she doesn’t know if anyone has since him.

She read an article once that claimed you could fall in love with anyone if you stared into their eyes for four minutes. She doesn’t think it counts in their case. She has too many feelings and they’re too big. She refuses to acknowledge their mirrors in Jughead’s eyes.

Just when she starts to expect he’s going to shift toward her, she speaks. “Maybe you could stay for a while. We could…watch a movie.”

He jolts back, as surprised as if she’d slapped him. But then he smiles, “I’d like that.”

With only a little disagreement—which included a five minute digression on Quentin Tarantino—they settle on _Before Sunrise_. It’s one of her favorites, and she’s pretty sure Jughead only agrees to get her to stop talking about it. Jughead sits straight in one corner of the couch while Betty pulls her legs in and hugs a pillow in the other. They each slowly melt as the movie plays, so his head rests against the back of the couch and his legs spread. She scooches down to rest her head on the arm of the couch, then relaxes until she’s lying on her side. Occasionally her feet brush against his leg.

 

When it ends, he turns the TV off and she sits up.

“So what did you think? Did you like it? Do you think they come back in six months?”

“It was cute. My vote is he does, she doesn’t,” Jughead says.

“Interesting. Even though Celine is the more romantic of the two?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Well, I guess you’ll just have to watch the sequel to find out.”

“Guess so. I like that it ends on the ambiguity, that the audience gets to decide. They simultaneously do and don’t. Like Schrödinger’s date.” He pauses, and then, “But also, doesn’t the fact that there is a sequel indicate that they do come back?”

“No spoilers.”

“Have it your way.” He leans forward to grab his phone off the coffee table. “I’ll just look it up on IMDB.”

“Forsythe Jones!”

“Elizabeth Cooper!” She reaches for him, trying to snatch the phone out of his hand. When she can’t reach, she pokes him in the side, in a spot she’s pretty sure he’s still ticklish.

She’s right. He leans toward her to shield his side and tosses the phone to her. “Have it your way then, spoilsport.”

“I am not the one being a spoilsport here. You were _literally_ going to look up spoilers.”

But with the end of the movie, there’s no good excuse for him to stay. Before he leaves, he pulls her into a hug with his hand on the back of her neck. And, with her head tucked into his chest, he, too, smells like the past.


	7. In which rogue parents appear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being friends with Jughead is surprisingly easy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI anyone who hasn’t seen the _Before Sunrise_ trilogy needs to stop reading and go watch it immediately because it will change your life.

Being friends with Jughead is surprisingly easy. He does watch _Before Sunset_ a few days later and texts her his thoughts. That spirals into an ongoing discussion of their favorite movies, tv shows, books, music. Jughead keeps much later hours than she does, so every day this week she’s woken up to a novel-length diatribe on a Thing she has to read or watch Right Now.

Veronica’s words sneak back into her head, as does Kevin’s face when she told him she and Jughead were trying to be friends, but she does her best to suppress them. Blowing up at him seems to have eased some of the pressure inside her. She fully acknowledges that she has a crush on him. But that’s all it is, a crush. He is attractive, and she regrets how it ended between them before, but he’s definitely a different man now. The boy she loves doesn’t exist anymore. She’s enjoying getting to know the man.

She’s in the middle of texting him at work when her phone rings. He’s trying to convince her to watch _Django Unchained_. She’s trying to distract him by asking him to help her think of a synonym for ‘asperity’ that doesn’t sound as mean. So when FaceTime opens up right in the middle of her typing, she answers it before she realizes what’s happening. But not before she sees who’s calling.

Mom. Normally Betty has to prepare herself to talk to Alice, to manufacture the acceptable emotions. Today though, the smile comes easily.

“Hi Mom!” Alice holds the phone too close so all Betty can see is the sharp planes of her mother’s face.

“Betty. Why are you answering the phone at work?” Time and grandmotherhood had softened Alice Cooper in many ways, but her opinions on most aspects of her daughters’ lives, up to and including how they spend their time, are just as strong as ever.

“Ah—if you didn’t want me to answer, why did you call?”

“Don’t be silly, of course I wanted you to answer. I’m just surprised you’re free. Are you sure this job isn’t too easy for you?”

“The job’s great, Mom. How are you? Have you guys heard from JJ and Rose?”

“They’re fine. Your sister heard from them. She also mentioned you’ve been seeing Jughead.” Okay, or we’ll go straight in for the kill.

“I’m not _seeing_ him, Mom. I’ve just _seen_ him. For work and stuff.”

“Good. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to get involved with that boy.”

Betty sighs, not surprised by the turn this conversation has taken. Then she asks softly, “Why do you hate him, Mom?”

“He broke your heart, sweetie, isn’t that reason enough?” It might be. If Alice were a normal mom.

“But that’s not it, though. You didn’t hate him then. It’s only been since—”

But Alice interrupts her before she can finish flipping through her mental calendar. “Have you talked to Hunter since you got to Chicago?”

“No, Mom. And I don’t plan to. We broke up. I’m okay with it. He’s okay with it. You’re the only one not okay with it.”

“I just think it was so sudden! What with that and moving so far away, are sure you’ve thought everything through? And now you’re seeing Jughead, I just want you to be sure you’re not making a mistake.” Betty resists the urge to rub her temples. It’s a conversation they’ve had before. More than once. Though the Jughead dimension adds some new seasoning to the mix. But Betty isn’t going to convince her today, and, regardless of answering the phone—or even texting—at work, she does still have things to get done.

“I am sure, Mom. Oh—Cynthia’s coming. Gotta go, love you, bye!”

She hangs up the phone and turns it face down before leaning back in her chair and running her hands over her face.

Alice still pronounces “Jughead” as if his name were two words.

She had liked him once. Betty could remember a time when she preferred him to Archie. But then, a few years ago Betty had brought _The Final Fissure_ home to read on a visit, and Alice’s face puckered up like she was sipping on vinegar. The couple of times Jughead has come up since, Alice’s face has darkened and she’s changed the topic as quickly as possible.

 

When they return from New York, Mary and Mike host a belated Fourth of July barbecue. They string up a triangular American flag banner and twinkle lights. Neighbors mingle on the sidewalk and in the yard. Kids play pick-up ball in the cul-de-sac. It’s quaint in a way Betty didn’t know cities could be. She arrives before Jughead, and wanders with a diet Coke in hand, sometimes stopping to talk or to help Mary refill a cooler or a party tray.

After an hour though, he still hasn’t returned her texts. She’s a little worried, it seems out of character for the short time they’ve been texting, so she heads upstairs where it’s quiet enough to call him. But on the landing, she can hear a familiar voice coming through a bedroom door.

She knocks twice before cracking the door open and peaking her head in. Jughead is sitting on the foot of the bed, one hand holding the phone to his ear, the other pinching the bridge of his nose.

He looks up, confused, when she opens the door but then waves her in.

“I know, Dad. I know. No, she’s just— Look, can you just talk to her? Maybe she’ll listen to you. I know that, but you can at least explain my reasons. Fine. Can we come back to this conversation later? Yeah, okay. Love you too.”

“Hey.”

“Hey.” His eyes are soft but his mouth still holds tension. He looks back down at his phone. “Oh, you texted.”

“Yeah, nothing important. How’s FP?”

“Fine.”

She quirks an eyebrow at him. “He is. JB on the other hand…” But he trails off, leaving Betty to fill in the blanks with information she does not have.

“Wanna talk about it?” She moves to sit next to him on the bed.

He shrugs and continues to talk down to his hands, where they hold the phone on his lap. “She got into Syracuse but she’s insisting she’s going to stay home and go to community college. Wants to study sound engineering or something.”

“I mean if that’s what she wants to do. You don’t want her spending four years unhappy and coming out of it in debt.”

“But that’s not it. She thinks we don’t know it’s cause she doesn’t want to leave FP. And _she’s_ the one who always insists he’s okay. Tells me _I_ worry too much.”

Betty pauses before she responds. She can see how delicate the situation is. If Jughead bought their house, Jellybean probably thinks this is her way of contributing. And, irrational as it is—families don’t keep score, not even hers—she understands where Jellybean is coming from. But Betty knows Jughead would shut that line of reasoning down. He’ll forever see the baby sister that needs love instead than the young woman that needs to give it.

“How does FP feel about it?”

“He says she’s an adult and can make her own decisions. She’s sure as hell not an adult if she’s gonna screw all her decisions up.” He moves one hand from his lap to crumple the comforter beside him.

“But you know you can’t decide for her.” She rubs a hand up and down his arm. “So why the blow up now? Didn’t she have to decide on a school a few months ago?”

“Well, yeah. But I may have thought she was gonna come to her senses and sent in a deposit for her.”

“Oh, Jug.” He looks up at her through a curtain of hair and her breath hitches. The co-mingled frustration-sadness-exhaustion on his face arrests her. It’s a face he wore so often in high school. The face of someone forced to be an adult too young. It’s a face she knows he’s trying to save Jellybean from.

So she encourages him to vent, and he does, a little. But before the tension has fully left his face, she sees him make the effort to smile at her. “Hey, let’s go rejoin the party. They’re probably wondering where you are.”

“Yeah, okay.” She lets him lead her out of the room, his hand on the space between her shoulder blades.

 

When they make it downstairs, he manages to shake off the mood. They get food and proceed outside to mingle, but he doesn’t leave her side unless it’s to refill her drink. And when either of them is away, it’s as if a magnet draws them back together.

Occasionally, his hand brushes against her lower back. She knows he’s just being considerate—maybe it’s some residual protectiveness redirected from Jellybean. But she can’t help that every touch drops heat into her bloodstream. And even as her blood heats up, that same protectiveness turns her ovaries to mush.

She tries to beat her hormones into submission.

Eventually, she leaves him chatting with Mike and heads inside to cut up another tray of fruit.

 

He does it again while she’s slicing up the watermelon, and she’s so startled the knife slips and cuts a gash in her thumb. For a moment she freezes, watching the blood well up, then Jughead grabs her wrist and drags her to the sink.

“Jesus, Betty, I’m sorry. I just wanted to check on you —”

“It’s okay Jug, it’s just a cut. It’ll be fine.”

The water stains the porcelain bowl of the sink a pale pink as it flushes the cut. Jughead squirts some soap into his hands and rubs them together until it foams before taking her hand again. He cups it gently in both of his and make shallow passes over the cut with his own thumb. For some reason, she feels tears sting the back of her throat.

When the water clears and the suds slip away down the drain, he says, “Here, come on. I’ll wrap it up.”

She follows him back upstairs, to the bathroom she’s since learned houses the advil. She hops up onto the counter while he rummages under the sink for the first aid kit. He’s not wearing his beanie again today. She resists the urge to run her fingers through his waves.

Then he lays the supplies out to the left of her and moves to stand in front of her parted legs. He picks up her left hand. It’s still a little damp. He frowns at it, and next at the hand towel laying beside the sink. Unsanitary, she thinks. Then he bends his head and blows softly on the cut. Betty gasps. Jughead freezes. The tops of his ears turn pink.

He drops her hand and leans over to grab the antibiotic ointment.

“It looks pretty shallow, so you should be fine. No stitches, or anything. Obviously,” he says, still looking away from her. When he dropped her hand, she’d curled it into her chest. The movement of her arm when she re-extends it draws his eyes back to her. He picks her hand back up and proceeds to smear the ointment on and attach the bandage with almost-clinical efficiency. But then he doesn’t let go.

Betty barely breathes. She can see the tight rise and fall of her chest in her peripheral vision.

“Jug?” He looks up from her hand, where his thumb is tracing circles on the soft underside of her wrist, as if to soothe away the pain she’d stopped noticing. “I promise it’s okay. You’re a great nurse.” She’s almost at his eye level.

He smiles. “Thanks. I am sorry though.”

“I know.” Her eyes slide to his mouth, where his front teeth keep catching and releasing his lower lip, and when she looks back up he’s watching her. His eyes are impossibly dark, pupils blown wide. He’d moved closer to her in the process of bandaging her thumb, into the cradle of her knees. She’d merely have to shift to bring their mouths together.

“I—”

He presses his lips against hers, kissing her so softly, as if he’s asking permission. She gasps again, which he must take for a yes because he squeezes her shoulder with his other hand and deepens the kiss. She kisses him back, sweeping her tongue across his, urging him to kiss her harder, but he refuses to be urged. She doesn’t think she’s ever been kissed so thoroughly, so languidly. The heat that’s been building in her belly for hours rises up and floods her system. It washes over her in dizzying, intoxicating waves.

When he moves to her neck, she lets out a small noise that makes him stop.

“I’m sorry. We shouldn’t do this.”

“We’re not doing anything. We’re making out in a bathroom.”

Betty isn’t funny. She isn’t sardonic like Jughead or full of witty one-liners like Veronica or Kevin. Even Cheryl’s insults usually make her laugh. And she’s not trying to be funny now. The single remaining synapse in her brain still capable of firing finds it advisable to simply take stock of the situation. They _are_ making out in a bathroom, after all.

But Jughead laughs. Before he’s finished, she’s hauled his mouth back to hers and wrapped an arm around his neck. Now, she controls the kiss. She bumps her teeth against his as she kisses him messily.

After a few minutes in which she finally gets him to pick up the pace, gets his lips to match the urgency she feels, he pulls back again.

“Betty, stop. There are things I need to—“

“Later.” His next protest turns into a groan when she sucks on his tongue. That seems to flip a switch in him. He kisses her so hard he shakes the breath from her lungs and she feels something begin to uncoil in the center of her chest.

His hands move from her waist down to her thighs, sliding up and down until he hooks them under her knees and lifts a little. It stretches her hips and feels as if he’s folding her, but it brings him closer. She wraps her legs around his waist, and her eyes go wide when she feels he’s already hard. His hands go to her ribcage, but she pulls them up to cup her breasts, where he strokes gentle circles. The sensation brings her hands to his arms and she squeezes muscles that were not there the last time they did this. Then, when he tugs on her lower lip with his teeth and soothes the bite with the flat of his tongue, she rakes her fingers across his scalp and he hisses against her.

She releases his mouth with a gasp and when he opens it to speak again she cuts him off. “If you stop or ask me if I’m okay or do anything other than kiss me again, I will bite you.”

He smirks at her, then pulls her face back to his with a hand on her neck. He whispers against her lips, “As you wish.” Then he uses his thumb, the same thumb that so delicately washed hers and stroked her wrist, to force her head back. He lays a series of sucking kisses down the column of her neck, and then he scrapes his teeth against her collarbone.

Bastard.

A knock sounds on the door. Jughead groans and rests his forehead on her shoulder.

Luckily it’s a guest. Someone who does not know them and who does not comment on their flushed faces and rumpled clothing. Betty slips out while Jughead sweeps the first aid supplies back under the sink.

They get separated again downstairs. But throughout the rest of the evening, when he’s not next to her, occasionally brushing his hand against her lower back, she can feel the weight of his gaze on her as she moves. Sometimes she catches him. Sometimes he blushes. Sometimes his brow is furrowed as if she’s a puzzle he’s trying to solve. Sometimes his face is so open she cannot read it.

He’s not the boy she loved. But she’s not the same girl either. Today wasn’t a continuation or a re-do. But it was fun. And he’s hot. And they’re millennials. They can hook up at a party and keep just being friends. 

Right?


	8. In which maple syrup plays a part

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s looking at her and he’s wearing a “This is what a feminist looks like” t shirt and _god_ why does she feel tears in the back of her throat _again_?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> rating change

Wrong. It’s Sunday morning. She was at Mike and Mary’s until 2, stopped counting her drinks around 11, but still she cannot sleep past 7 if her life depends on it. This morning, though, it’s not her normal Type-A-follow-a-routine-even-in-your-sleep neuroticism that’s doing it to her. It’s Jughead, yesterday on the bathroom counter.

Thank God she doesn’t seem to have a hangover yet.

See, Betty Cooper is Smart. She has always been Smart. Granted, she’s not smart in the natural genius way that Dilton Doiley, or, really, even Jughead, is. But she was still in the special class with them on Monday afternoons in elementary school. She thinks through her decisions. She even makes pro-con lists about what brand of laundry detergent to buy (Which one is the cheapest? Which the most environmentally friendly? Will synthetic fragrances give her cancer?).

Being Smart, being Perfect, being Alice’s Cooper’s daughter has done a number on her over the years. At various points in her life, she’s done better than others at fighting the expectations for who she’s supposed to be. Who others expect her to be. And it’s not an identity that can be relinquished so easily. But she does her damnedest at trying. This year, so far, has been one of those better times. The year after her break-up with Jughead had been one of the worse times. It had been her first heartbreak. Her only heartbreak. Ending things with Archie had been amicable. And Hunter, well—she supposes as the breaker-upper that _she_ broke _his_ heart, but, truthfully, she doesn’t think she really did. Not in any lasting way, anyway.

Her whole relationship with Hunter, though, had been a slow and insidious encroaching of the life her parents had planned for her. It wasn’t his fault. But he was white-picket-fence-apple-pie-Americana. Jughead was right, he _would_ have looked at home in a J. Crew catalogue. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s a life that came easily to her, not a life she actively wanted.

And she’s determined to find that life. One she wants, one she’d be willing to fight for if it was threatened. In her head, she calls that life, that version of herself, New Betty. New Betty is getting better and better at separating what _she_ wants from what she’s _supposed_ to want. And yet somehow, amidst the successes of moving and working and forging her new life, she’s found herself re-embroiled in an old one. Maybe to go forward you have to go back.

All of this is to say, she knows this is probably a bad idea. It’s a stupid idea. It could ruin things. Maybe. But after nearly a lifetime of always making the right decisions and never disappointing anyone, she thinks she’s earned the right to make one or two stupid decisions.

Not that she’s making a decision. She’s just considering the pros and cons. She isn’t planning to date him. Or hook up with him. Or even just kiss him in a bathroom. But she wouldn’t stop it if it happened again.

 

She also wants to know what Jughead was trying to tell her in between kissing her brains out yesterday. So, she fluffs her hair, picks up her tote bag, and crosses the boulevard to knock on his door.

He answers in a pair of plaid pyjama pants and an untied robe, a folded towel held against his shirtless chest. Which she only sees out of her peripheral vision. Because she’s looking at his face. Really.

“Betty?” His eyes are still sleepy and confused, and he reaches one arm up to the top of the door frame, leaning his side against the doorjamb.

“I just—sorry—I just wanted to check out the farmer’s market here and I texted Mary for your address on a whim. It was stupid. I’ll let you get back to your Sunday morning.”

“No—no, come in.” She’s already started to turn away but he grabs her hand and pulls her into the house.

When her eyes adjust, they’re in a living room—obviously. It’s his living room. His apartment couldn’t be more different than hers. Where hers is all shiny steel and concrete and high-rise, his is weathered brownstone, two-flat, front porch. She’s jealous. It looks like him inside—soft leather and dark textiles. Books erupting out of their shelves, stacked precariously in towers on the floor.

He leads her down a hallway to the kitchen at the back of house. The whole apartment is long and narrow, as she’s learned most old buildings in Chicago are. In the kitchen, a mixing bowl and various ingredients are spread across the counter. She rights a bottle of maple syrup that was lying on its side.

“Ah, yeah. I had a bit of an accident right before you came. I was actually about to hop in the shower.” He tosses the towel onto a chair. “I was trying to make pancakes.” Right. She spots flour, eggs, milk.

“You know, most people usually put the maple syrup on _after_ they’ve cooked the pancakes.”

“Smart aleck. Jones family recipe says you put a little in the batter too. But my hand slipped and I sort of spilled it all over me.”

Now that she’s paying attention, the center of his chest—which she’s not staring it—looks weirdly shiny.

“You can go ahead and set your stuff on the chair. I’m just gonna go wipe this shit off and put a shirt on.”

 

When he comes back, he leans against the stove and just looks at her.

He’s looking at her, and he’s wearing a “This is what a feminist looks like” t shirt and _god_ why does she feel tears in the back of her throat _again_? How does he keep doing this to her with just his stupid face and his stupid hands and, now, his stupid t shirts?

He catches her staring and shrugs sheepishly. “Jelly got it for me for Christmas.”

A rather indelicate sound escapes her throat. It’s halfway between a snort and a hysterical laugh and even Jughead looks alarmed and then she’s kissing him and she has no idea how it happened except she’s pretty sure she initiated it because maybe her feet moved and she’s definitely closer to the island than she was a minute ago.

She may have started it but it only takes him a second to respond, to take control of the kiss. He grips her face and sinks into her like she’s oxygen and he’s drowning. He bites her lips and she pants and suddenly he’s inside of her, stroking her tongue with his and it’s so effing dirty.

She slides her hands up and down his back, using them to pull him closer, to press herself against his hips. He releases her mouth with a wet, sucking sound and peppers kisses all over her face. Then she dips her head and presses a kiss to the underside of his jaw and she hears all the air leave him in an instant. She smiles against his skin as she moves to his ear.

But he cords his fingers through her hair and pulls her back, forcing her to arch her neck.

“Did I tell you I like your hair like this?”

She gives the smallest shake of her head, no.

“I do. I love your neck.” He kisses her again, his hand still immobilizing her head. His other hand slides down her arm and weaves her fingers through his. He draws it up between them and kisses her bandaged thumb, then slides her arm over his shoulder.

His mouth is just as thorough as it was yesterday, but where before he was slow, tentative, today he is relentless. His lips dominate hers, he commands all her attention. He takes her mouth, over and over again, until they’re breathing in sync. His skin is hot, so hot, he’s burning her up.

She gets the sense they’re moving. He turns her and walks her backwards until her back hits something. He moves a hand to her ass and then hikes one of her legs up around his waist and god he’s already hard and all she wants to do is cant her hips into him. His fingers are gripping her thigh so hard it hurts. She moans, from the pain, from the feel of him against her core, from the sheer overwhelmingness of these feelings. From the spark of heat that’s always in his eyes that seems to have flared into a white hot fire in an instant.

It’s everything but it’s not enough. She rescues her hands from where they’re trapped against his chest and she rucks his shirt up, using her nails to scratch against his stomach.

“Off. Take it off.” When he pulls away, smirking, to comply, she takes advantage of the space to whip her own shirt off. When she can see again, the tattoo stretched across his left pec and shoulder surprises her. It’s a relief map of Sweetwater River, the one that appeared in the opening pages of his book. But he’s augmented it here—tucked into the landscape, she sees the stylized crown he used to mark everything with, a jellybean, the Serpents’ two-headed snake symbol and what looks to be a small book.

She leans forward to kiss it while reaching back to unhook her bra when his hands stop her and she looks up.

His brows are drawn together and there’s a storm in his eyes. “Let me.”

But he doesn’t take it off, he just tugs it down til her breasts pop out and he’s _biting her nipple_ and dear god. She keens and with that noise she lets go of the last remaining bits of perfect-girl-next-door Betty Cooper. This is how she’s always wanted someone to touch her. This is how she remembers Jug touching her in the little bit they’d done before he pulled away from her. But Archie and Hunter and even the couple of boys she’d kissed at fraternity parties had treated her like she was something precious and fragile, like she was a gift for them. But she doesn’t want to be a gift. She wants to be a wildfire.

She unzips and pushes her jeans down while palming him over his pants. He groans into her hair and traps her hand with his.

“ _Fuck_. Stop, stop.” He breathes and squeezes her wrist. “Betty?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you want this?”

“Mmph,” she says, with his tattoo again in her mouth.

He pulls away from her then. “No. You have to tell me you want this.”

“Yes, Jug, yes. Please.”

He looks at her, likes he’s waiting for her to say something else but she doesn’t. After a moment, he dips his chin down in a single nod. “Okay. Get up on the counter.”

She scrambles to get her hands behind her and hoist herself up. Once her butt makes contact with the formica, he pulls her jeans, panties, shoes off in a single tangle of fabric.

He leans up to kiss her again, then drops back to his knees, sliding his arms along the tops of her thighs. Then he slips his hands under her legs and hooks them over his shoulders. He presses a line of kisses up her inner thigh and against her slit and soft sound escapes her. He slides two fingers into her and curls them as he licks his way around her.

She lets him for a minute or two, then when her vision is beginning to go blur, she pulls him back up by the hair. She’s panting.

“Later. Inside me, now.”

He shoves his pants down with the hand not currently inside her and he’s not wearing any underwear. Then he removes his fingers and before she can mourn the loss, he sucks them into his mouth one at a time.

He grabs a condom out of a drawer behind him and rips the condom packet open with his teeth. She can’t help but laugh at the serious look on his face. “Sorry, I just—I’ve never seen someone do that in real life.” He smirks, then slides inside her and her laugh turns into a groan as her eyes rolls back in her head.

He has a hand around the base of her neck, his thumb in the hollow of her throat, and he uses it for leverage as he pounds into her. There’s no warm up. Every thrust is measured and controlled. A steady tempo driving her higher and higher.

Somewhere, through the haze of Jughead surrounding and overpowering all her senses, she registers the soap on the corner of the sink, shuddering in time to his thrusts.

She digs her heels into his backside and it gives her just enough leverage, just enough friction—

“No, not yet.” His hands still her hips and he pulls back. She lets out a wordless noise of protest and opens her eyes.

He wraps an arm around her lower back, bringing their bodies flush together, then he kisses her, sucking her lower lip between his.

“Do you want to come?” he asks against her mouth. When she whines and nods so eagerly she knows she should feel embarrassed, he slips a hand between them.

“Then I’ll make you come, but it’s not nice to leave me behind.” But his fingers are sending sparks through her and soon he’s driven her so high she tips right over the edge. She clamps down tight and draws his release out of him right alongside her.

 

“That wasn’t exactly how I planned on spending my Sunday morning.”

She looks up, horrified as she realizes she may have pushed him into something he wasn’tcomfortable with or ready for.

But like always, he could read her face. “No, Betts. I definitely wanted to. That was so freaking hot. I just—look. I want to talk to you. Will you stay while I shower? I’ll make you breakfast. There’s even a little maple syrup left.”

She smiles at him, feeling shy now for reasons that have nothing to do with her current clothes-less state.

 

When Jughead disappears back down the hallway and into the shower, she takes the opportunity to unabashedly snoop through his apartment. She pulls a t-shirt off the floor and wanders after him.

She hadn’t gotten a good look before. In the living room, the brown leather couch is flanked by matching denim armchairs. Weirdly, it works. On one wall, bookshelves surround a large TV. The coffee table between them houses some sort of game controller she couldn’t name and a bowl and fork that could probably stand to be washed. On the whole though, it’s not messy. The phrase organized chaos gallops across her brain.

The video games, the books, the evidence of an unending appetite, don’t surprise her, but some things do. The front windows open onto the boulevard and the breeze causes the curtains to billow over a handful of what seem to be well-looked after houseplants. The hallway is lined with art. Some of the photos she recognizes, but the drawings and paintings are foreign to her. A framed photo of Jellybean and FP occupies a place of honor next to the TV.

She runs her fingers along the spines of his books, stopping when she gets to his copy of _The Final Fissure_ , curious if he’s made any notes in his own book. He hasn’t, but as she flips through the pages, a picture falls out. It’s of them, their first—their only—Christmas together. Where the picture had been folded and creased before, now the weight of the book has pressed it flat. She swallows and tucks the photo and book back into their place.

On the opposite wall, his bedroom door is ajar. She sees the mess of an unmade bed through the opening, but doesn’t venture farther. Part of it’s a healthy sense of shame. She’s been enough of a voyeur so far this morning. But, she’s psychoanalyzed enough to admit, it’s also a fear of intimacy. The bathroom door stands closed, a bit of steam escaping from the crack in the bottom. The third door, the closest to the front of house, is wide open.

The spare bedroom seems to be his writing space. It has another window overlooking the boulevard; she can see people picnicking. Children do somersaults, a little dog chases a bigger one. Farther down, the white tents of the farmers’ market block her view of the square and the centennial column.

On the desk, his laptop is open but dark. Next to it, Jughead’s spiky handwriting is scrawled in red pen across the pages of a reporter’s notebook. A large stack of paper is held together with a binder clip. _Sweetwater Subtext_ in typewriter font on the front. The rest of the desk is a spread of yellowed newspaper clippings and print-outs of what looks like security camera footage. The pictures are blown-up, black and white, grainy. But familiar.

She moves closer. The first thing that attracts her eyes is the white time stamp in the bottom right corner.

Her stomach drops out.

She gathers the photos into a stack and picks them up with shaking hands. She knows what she’s going to see, but she looks anyway.

In the first, a serpent named Mustang pokes a bound Jason Blossom in the chest. 7/10/2017 8:47 pm.

Then, Clifford Blossom replaces Mustang. He holds up his right hand, pinching something between his thumb and forefinger—Betty knows it to be her sister’s former engagement ring. 07/11/2017 2:18 am.

07/11/2017 2:33 am. The gun, extended, between father and son.

07/11/2017 2:34 am. The gun, back at Clifford’s side, and Jason’s slumped body.

07/11/2017 3:47 am. Joaquin and FP standing in front of Jason spread out on the floor, his head in a pool of his own blood.

07/11/2017 4:13 am. A shot of FP’s face as he holds a stained rag up to the camera lens.

And then, a new angle. The last one shows what Betty assumes to be the upstairs of the Whyte Wyrm— at least the giant stuffed and mounted snake would indicate so. In the lower left corner of the photo, a man stands next to the deserted bar.

Not a man.

Her father.

Her father stands next to the deserted bar.

It has the same time stamp as the third photo.

She hears the shower stop running.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The slow burn flared into a flame and someone got burned.
> 
> Would y'all kill me if I updated NNK next instead of this?


	9. In which Betty finds out where the bodies are buried

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He slides a banker’s box out from under the desk and sits with his legs spread around it as he lifts off the lid. She drops to her knees beside him. He hands her a manila file folder off the top. It’s FP’s record.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well at least now we get to find out what Jughead’s hiding?

It’s almost impressive how the universe has decided to screw with her. It’s also just sick. She realizes, looking at the date stamp on the printout, that it has been 12 years to the day since Jughead left her, one year and seventeen days after Jason’s death.

She feels him enter the room behind her. And (she might be imagining it, but) she feels the air pressure change when he realizes what she’s holding.

“Betty—”

“What is this, Jughead?”

She turns and he’s leaning against the doorway, wearing only the towel from earlier wrapped around his waist. His arms are crossed so tightly the tattoo on his chest bulges and she can see all the veins in his forearms.

“Security footage.” She glares at him and he sighs, his whole body sagging, before scrubbing his hands over his face.

“You remember the tape?”

“Of fucking course I remember the tape.”

“Well it didn’t show…all of it. Hal was there.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

She tosses all the photos but the one back onto the desk and moves to push past him, but he grabs her arm. “Where are you going?”

“To get dressed.”

“What?” For just a second, he squeezes her wrist so tightly it hurts. Then he drops it like a hot coal.

“You are going to tell me what this is. But I’m not talking about it while we’re both practically naked.”

She rushes to the kitchen and shoves her jeans back on her body, dropping her bra in the tote still sitting on a chair. When she returns, Jughead’s bedroom door is closed, so she sits on the couch and pulls her hair up into a tight little ponytail on the top of her head.

When he comes back out, he drops his beanie on the coffee table and sits in the armchair to her right. He pulls a comb out of his pocket and proceeds to brush his hair. He does all this while staring at the wall over her shoulder.

She waits silently. Eventually he lets out a deep exhale and stands, throwing the comb down on top of the beanie. He disappears down the hallway and comes back with two mugs, a chemex, and an electric kettle. He leaves and returns with spoons, a jug of milk, and a roll of paper towels.

She lets him fiddle with his props a while. When he’s folded a paper towel into a square and set a steaming mug of coffee—prepared the way she still likes it, only with milk—on top, she lays the photo down on the coffee table between them and says,  “What was he doing there, Jughead?”

“I don't know. I've been trying to find out.”

She thinks of the laptop, the notebook, the manuscript. “And you were what? Going to write about it?” 

Out of the swirling vortex of emotions her mind is currently unable to process, anger emerges and she clings to it like a buoy. Except for the moment he grabbed her wrist, he has been so calm. She wants a rise out of him. She wants some indication he’s feeling even an iota of what she does. This situation is so unbearably familiar.

“Yes! No. I don’t know.” His hand clenches around the handle of his mug. She watches the tendons pop out then fade again. “I’ve definitely thought about writing about it.”

“And you weren’t going to tell me?” The look he gives her would be funny if they were in any circumstances but the current ones.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we haven’t exactly been on speaking terms the past dozen years.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Your father’s!”

“What?” Anger gives way to an anxiety that bubbles in her stomach and claws its way up her esophagus.  For the first time in a long time, she has difficulty keeping her hands from balling into fists. She snatches up the paper towel Jughead had placed her coffee cup on and commences shredding it into smaller and smaller pieces.

“ I’ve been trying to find out what he was doing there—what he knew—since it happened and—”

“What do you mean since it happened?”

He looks confused at her interruption. “Oh. No, not _it_ as in Jason. It as in us. Since my dad’s trial. Do you remember Viper? He started bartending at the Wyrm the fall after we broke up. Told me there was another camera that Keller fucking missed. Helped me and the lawyer pull the footage.”

“Wait the lawyer? What about Mary?”

“She couldn’t represent FP. She doesn’t do criminal law and her bar license had lapsed in New York. The Serpents had their own lawyer, anyway.”

“Okay. But why was my dad there? What does this have to do with us?”

“Can we maybe just focus on the Jason Blossom murder plot for now?”

“Fuck no. You’re not wiggling your way out of this anymore. What. Is. It.”

Jughead stares at her for a moment and at first she can’t tell if he’s angry or annoyed or what. She sees his jaw working back and forth. But then she watches the decision to tell her wash over his face. She couldn’t tell you the moment, couldn’t tell you what individual feature change made it happen, but it’s as if a mask he put on in the parking lot of Pop’s twelve years ago finally comes off. Every plane of his face is etched in pain but the flint in his eyes tells her his fury simmers under the surface.

“You know how Southside got out of school a week before Riverdale that year? Well, one day I was hanging around the Wyrm waiting for it to be time to pick you up from school and your dad showed up. He said—” Jughead laughs but the sound is sharp, bitter. “God, I remember it exactly. He said, ‘Your relationship with my daughter has gone on long enough, don’t you think?’” His eyes cut to hers.

“He told you to break up with me? And you listened to him?”

“Actually, he threatened.” A roaring noise fills her ears and she becomes aware that she’s breathing way too fast. Jughead is staring at her as if he’s either expecting her to start crying or to explode. Thankfully, he doesn’t try to touch her. She’s sure if he did she would cry, she wouldn’t be able to stop the panic tears she’s only barely restraining now. He just waits a minute for her to get herself under control, then picks up the photo.

“He WHAT.”

“Well, he did try bribing me first.”

“What the hell did he trying bribing you with?”

“Nothing I wanted. So he showed up again later that summer. I asked you once how far your dad would go to protect Polly. To protect you. And I found out. Betty, he said — he told me he was there, that night, at the Worm. The night Clifford Blossom shot Jason. He said he was willing to testify that FP was an accomplice. That he didn’t just clean it up but that he helped Daddy Blossom plan it. It would have meant fifteen years, Betts.” His voice cracks on her name.

 

They argue their way around his apartment. In the kitchen, he gets her a glass of ice then turns to wash the dishes they’d just created. When his back is turned, she pulls out a cube and moves to stand next to the trash so it won’t make a mess as it melts. He tells her about finding the video too late. Two months after she’d stopped calling him. He tells her about the night Sheriff Keller brought her dad in for questioning. He tells her her parents own a stake in the Whyte Wyrm. That that’s why Hal said he was there. That Keller bought his story. That Hal smirked and nodded at him as he left the station. Like they were in cahoots. Like they had a deal.

When they leave the kitchen, she moves her bags with them, if only to keep having something to do with her hands. Then she stands outside the bathroom while he replenishes the store of toilet paper under the sink from the closet. While he refills the hand soap, he tells her about FP’s trial. About her dad’s testimony. He tells her and she hates that she’s not surprised she didn’t know any of this was happening.

He leads her back into the spare bedroom. He gets down on his knees while she tries not to stare at the photos she’d tossed so haphazardly across the desk. They seem indecent now. Like crime scene photos. Which they sort of are. Only the crime isn’t just Jason Blossom’s shot and leaking body, it’s this moment and that moment and all the moments in between in which she wondered what she did wrong. 

What she did was be born to the wrong parents. And FP paid for it. Jellybean paid for it. Jughead paid for it.

He slides a banker’s box out from under the desk and sits with his legs spread around it as he lifts off the lid. She drops down beside him. He hands her a manila file folder off the top. It’s FP’s record. Tampering with evidence. Obstruction of justice. Mishandling a body. Perjury. Five years.

They’re details she already knows but it’s as if she’s had the outline sketch and now he’s suddenly filled in the color. “You didn’t put any of this in the book.”

“What? No, no I didn’t.”

“That’s a pretty fucking important thing to leave out, don’t you think? You wrote about everything else. You wrote about Clifford Blossom’s suicide. You even put some of the trial stuff in the afterword. You wrote about…” But her voice cracks and she can finally feel the tears coming, so she stops. She blinks quickly to keep them from falling.

“I didn’t want you to find out that way. I didn’t want you to find out at all, but definitely not that way.”

“So you lost your father so I wouldn’t have to lose mine?”

“I was losing him anyway. FP _was_ guilty, Betty. Keller’s a dick but he was right. FP _did_ let the Serpents kidnap Jason. He _did_ tamper with the evidence. Hell, he tried to toss the body. And I knew I’d get him back if I kept my mouth shut. You couldn’t un-know this. I always knew who FP was. I always knew he wasn’t a good guy. If you knew, you’d lose Hal forever.”

“But I still did. Don’t you get it? I still lost him. I’d already lost him. I lost him when he sent away my sister. And I lost _you_.”

Betty fights to control her voice, her hands, her tears. The whole time, Jughead keeps his head down, looking at the file on her lap. She didn’t need him to protect her from who her parents were.

“I wouldn’t have judged you for picking FP over me, Juggie. I would have told you to.”

“I know that. But I didn’t want you to have to. It wasn’t a choice you could make for me. It—and the guilt—were mine. I couldn’t let you absolve me of them. By the time the trial was over, you hated me. I hated myself. And I had no cell phone and I was being babysat every fucking second of the day. For months I thought of nothing but coming after you and telling you what I’d done. But then when everything kept coming up roses for your dad—If there was even a chance he _could_ come up with some evidence, they could always try FP again. It’d be a new charge. I couldn’t risk calling his bluff.”

“So  you let him bully you.  You let me believe you didn’t love me anymore. You let me give up on us.”

“What did you want me to do, Elizabeth?”

In some small corner in the back of her mind, Betty has been marvelling at how incrediblethis conversation is. She can still hear the picnickers on the boulevard outside. Shafts of sunlight and laughter swing between the billowing curtains. But inside, in the shadows of his apartment, Jughead isquietly and methodically dismantling everything she’s known about her life. Except for the occasional cracks, everything has been measured, calm. Now, though, now his anger begins to bleed through.

“You should have told me.”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference! I still would have had to choose.”

“But I deserved to know! It would have made a difference to _my_ life. _My dad_ was the guilty one, Jughead.”

“He was your father.”

“He was _guilty._ How can you stand there and defend him?” Her anger is feeding on his and all she wants is to whip them both into a storm that will purge them of a dozen years of hurt and anger and betrayal and longing. But he’s right. She can’t un-know. And again, he manages to put the lid back on.

“I’m not. God, believe me I’m not. But I have had a bit more time to process this than you. I hate him. I will always hate him. But I can’t blame him for doing everything in his power to protect you, even though he thought he had to protect you from me. I would have done the same.”

 

She’s suddenly aware that the wooden floor has been digging into her knees. She shifts and draws them up against her, massaging out the lines the floor has cut. Now, though, they both lean against the wall, nearly shoulder to shoulder.

**“** You were right. **”**

“What?”

“I told myself it was for your own good. To protect you. That it was inevitable anyway so I was just setting you free. But that wasn’t it. I don’t know if I was more afraid of taking your dad’s offeror rejecting it. It didn’t matter, I was afraid of screwing up. So I let him choose for me.”

It’s what she’s always known, but somehow it hurts more to hear the words aloud. Somehow the explanation hurts more than the excuse.

“But don’t you get it? I had to. I had to do it, Betty. Even if you’d known. If Hal had come after us. Me. If he’d come after FP and you knew—you would have tried to stop it. We would have done stupid things to try to stop it. This wasn’t just breaking into convents and finding abandoned cars. I couldn’t get through it if I had to be worrying about you every second of the day too.”

“And that’s it, isn’t it?” she says quietly. She’s been fighting it off, but the pain swamps her then. It whooshes through her. Concussive. Massive and totalizing in its intensity. She stands and staggers back into the living room.

“What?”

When he follows her, she continues, “You know, there are a million reasons it didn’t work out with Hunter, but one of them was that no matter what I did or what I achieved, he always treated me like I was something fragile, something to be protected. You didn’t. Or I thought you didn’t, but I guess I was wrong. So I just need a minute—” She squeezes her eyes shut and wills herself, once again, not to cry. Not over him. Not where he can see. But it would take more than a minute to fit the broken pieces of her heart back together again. 

He remains in the doorway to the spare bedroom, as if the liminal space, somewhere in between knowledge and memory, past and present, truth and fiction, will somehow protect him.

“When I was deciding to call off my engagement, I thought about all the men I’ve loved in my life. Hunter. Archie. My dad. Kevin. Even Reggie and I were pretty close friends at one point. And I realized, even Archie and Hunter, I loved them like I loved Kevin. Like I loved Reggie. I thought maybe the butterflies and the fireworks were just because we were in high school, that real life, that grown up love didn’t look like that. I thought maybe I didn’t get to have it. But that’s not true. What’s true is that apparently I’ve never been in love with anyone since you. And even you didn’t know me well enough or care about me enough to know that I didn’t need you to protect me. I just needed you to be honest with me. To pick me. To trust me. You should have told me.”

“God, Betty.“ 

“I have to go.”

“What? Betts, no—”

But she’s already out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here’s some happy bonus info to counteract this painful chapter: He and Archie got the tattoos together when they went to Cancun with Mike and Mary for spring break the year after they graduated college. Archie got musical notation wrapped around his bicep. Jug didn’t add the journal til later, so Archie doesn’t know about it.
> 
> Also, “hot coal” is a really cliche metaphor but I couldn’t resist the pun.


	10. In which a change of scenery takes place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He lied to me.” She doesn’t know if she’s talking about Jughead or her father, but, in the end, she supposes, it doesn’t really matter.

She steps out of Jughead’s apartment and into an uber. Well, not immediately. She can’t telepathically summon ride-hailing services. Though she’s sure someone in Silicon Valley is working on that very problem in this exact moment. A hysterical laugh gets caught in her throat at the thought.

She’s worried Jughead will come after her, so she zigzags a couple of blocks until she’s on the far side of the square. In between a coffee shop and a wine bar, she finds a large hedge to stand beside, and then she summons the car. Thankfully, his neighbourhood is still busy on a Sunday afternoon, and there are many small black icons zooming around when she opens the app. The wait is less than two minutes.

Kevin, she knows, is at work, some special project keeping him up at all hours and in the office, even on weekends. Polly doesn’t pick up. It’s her day off, so Betty assumes her sister and her sister’s boyfriend are enjoying their last few days of kid-free time. And, while she’s so glad she and Veronica are reconnecting again, she doesn’t think they’re quite at the point for this. Even if they were, she also doesn’t think _she’s_ quite ready for Ronnie’s particular blend of supportively brutal honesty. Archie is an option she doesn’t even consider.

So, she goes to the only person who knew her then.

She manages to recapture and hold onto her anger all through the car ride. It feels righteous, powerful, and, unfortunately, all too short. Because once she steps into Mary’s house, she bursts into tears. Something deep inside her, long forced closed and held together with glue, staples, tape, cracks open and grief stampedes through her. She’s vaguely aware of Mary pulling her to the couch, wrapping her arms around her, and rocking her. Mary rubs circles on Betty’s back and makes calm shushing noises. She speaks only enough to ascertain that no one’s been injured or died, then she just lets Betty unload until she’s empty.

She cries for an embarrassingly long time, in violent sobs that wrack her body and cause a headache to bloom behind her eyes.

At some point, she comes to and slides from the couch to the floor. It’s still light out, though it is the middle of summer, so all that really tells her is it’s before 9 pm. Her throat is dry and lips parched. There’s a water bottle on the coffee table in front of her. She grabs it and drinks half in a series of gulps. Mike must have brought it out for her. She hasn’t noticed him in the haze of her heartache, but he must be around somewhere.

Betty settles back against Mary’s legs and lets her stroke her hair, allowing herself to be comforted by the maternal gesture.

“He lied to me.” She doesn’t know if she’s talking about Jughead or her father, but, in the end, she supposes, it doesn’t really matter.

 

Once she gets to her gate, Betty tries to take up as much space as she possibly can without feeling guilty about it. She picks a seat at the end of a row and sets her purse next to her, her sweater in the seat next to that. Her suitcase she slides so it’s partially in front of a fourth seat. She creates a forcefield of belongings so no one can approach her.

Yesterday had scooped her out and left her numb, depleted. But the one good thing about a multi-hour crying jag is its cleansing power. Sitting at the gate, she feels a renewed sense of purpose.

As soon as it’s crossed nine o’clock, she calls Cynthia.

“Betty, why are you calling me? Why don’t you just come down the hall? We can start our Monday meeting a little early.”

“I’m not in the office, Cynth. I had a bit of a personal emergency. I’m actually at O’Hare waiting for a flight back to Riverdale.” In all her years of grown-up-hood, Betty’s never done something like this. When her father died, they’d known it was coming, so she’d made arrangements to work from home and had trained the person who’d filled in for her on the things she couldn’t do remotely. Anxiety bubbles in her stomach at the thought of disappointing Cynthia.

“Oh no, is everything okay? Your family?”

“No, they’re fine. It’s more a me thing. But I’m so sorry to just leave like this. I know I don’t have vacation time or anything yet, but I was thinking I could use some sick days? Though I don’t know how long I’ll be gone—no more than a week surely. But I can also just take it as unpaid time, I know I’m leaving you in the lurch. And I have a piece half-finished—”

“Betty, stop. We’ll survive. We were gonna run your FP Jones interview this week anyway before his pre-publication publicity circuit starts next month.”

“Oh right.”

The flare of anger she has at the memory of her and Jughead in the bar in May, the moment she first started letting him back in, gives her the courage to get to the thing she’s been thinking about since she cried herself to sleep, then woke up at midnight on Mary’s couch and bought the plane ticket.

“Look, about that. The personal thing. I have a piece to pitch you. I think we should extend the Jones series to three articles. I’ll still review the new book. But I wanna write about—about Betsy Coleman. About being her. About what really happened, all the stuff Jughead omitted from the story. I want to write about it.”

But Cynthia knows her. Knows how deeply uncomfortable she’d been at the prospect of being publicly connected to the character.

“Oh honey, no. Why don’t we just talk about that when you get back?”

She lets Cynthia talk to her down, but she makes notes on the story anyway, while drinking the largest Starbucks green tea frappucino she thinks she can get away with without totally wrecking her blood sugar. She doesn’t mind that Jughead had written about her, about their life. She’d always known he would, had believed it in all the years between their break-up and _The Final Fissure_ ’s publication. She couldn’t begrudge him the one thing that she knows has always kept him sane, the thing that he does so beautifully it would be a crime to keep it from the rest of the world. She can’t begrudge the world for wanting to share in that. But, now, she’s pissed that he made her the heroine. She’s pissed that he put her on a pedestal, even while her own family was just as dirty as the Blossoms, the Kellers, the McCoys. In the Civil War between the North and the South of Riverdale, it was the Montagues that were blameless. Her own Capulets commanded every gun, every sword, every gavel.

 

She does wind up talking to Veronica, huddled against a charging station, and Ronnie makes her laugh through the tears that occasionally threaten.

Betty is jealous of Veronica (what else is new?). She is jealous of how sure and easy things are between her and Archie. And _god_ she’s jealous of the sex she knows they must be having.

“It’s like the universe was saying here’s what you get, Elizabeth. You finally get to have areally great lay and then it all comes crashing down around your ears,” she whisper-yells, all too aware of the businessman in the row behind her. She hates being on FaceTime in public. Headphones make it marginally better, but not enough dispel her anxieties over being heard.

“Betty, that’s not how it works and you know it. You and Jughead, it sounds like you were a ticking time bomb anyway. Both physically and emotionally.”

“Bomb is exactly the right word. Only there’s a hell of a lot more shrapnel than I predicted.”

“Are you sure you should be leaving right now? I’m sure Jughead’s worried about you if you just ran out on him. And your mother—look, I may have only known her a short while but Alice Cooper makes an impression. Don’t you want to be calm when you see her?”

“I need to know, Ron. And she’s out of town right now, so I’ll have some time to figure out what I want to say. To look for, I don’t know, something.”

“Do you want to talk to Archie? I can wake him up.”

“No, I’m not ready yet.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t know.” She feels her nostrils flare.

“How could he not know?” She doesn’t know what would be worse — if Archie had lied to her or if Jughead had lied to Archie. Even through her own pain, she’d noticed how deeply Archie had felt Jughead’s loss. She’d been so pleased when she’d heard they’d reconnected. She didn’t want to come between them. Even at the time, she’d felt guilty for being with Archie. And sometimes, she’s pretty sure he felt the same. But they’d needed each other then, to hold each other up whenthe foundation had crumbled beneath them.

No, she knows what would be worse. As much as she hates having Robin Scherbatsky-ed them, the thought of her lifelong best friend, the only person who’d always been there for her, who’d always been honest with her, even when it would have hurt her less to lie, the thought of him keeping something like this from her—Well, it’s almost as bad as Jughead keeping it from her.

 

As she readies to board the plane, she finally pulls up their text message thread. He called her eight times yesterday, before finally giving up around 11 pm. He also sent her twenty-two texts, none of which she’d read. When she’d awoken at midnight on Mary’s couch, she’d opened the apps to get rid of the notifications, then pulled up the internet to book her flight. She hands her boarding pass to the gate attendant to scan, then shuffles along the jet bridge and scrolls through them.

“betty come back”

“you can’t just wander around a neighborhood you don’t know”

“i have more to tell you”

“i really want to talk to you”

“please answer me”

“you forgot your food. and your bra”

“hello”

“i will keep texting and calling you until you answer me”

“i just want to make sure you’re safe”

“please betts”

“i didn’t want to make it worse”

“i should have told you a long time ago”

“but in my defense it was pretty clear you’d moved on”

“shit ignore that last one”

“betty”

“betty”

“betty come on”

“answer your phone damn it”

“i’m sorry”

“just tell me you’re okay. please.”

“nvm, heard from mary”

“i’m here when you’re ready to talk.”

There’s one more text, from 5 o’clock that morning: “just please be ready to talk sometime”. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

Now, she responds: “can you send me copies of the security photos you have?”

He calls her when she’s still getting settled in her seat, and his voice is a familiar cocktail of anger, panic, and pain. “Betty, where are you?” Before she can answer, the flight attendant’s voice comes over the intercom. “Are you on a plane?”

“Yes.” She doesn’t mean to be short, but it’s hard to know what to say, what she _can_ say in this moment.

“Where are you going?”

She debates not telling him, but knows he’d figure it out anyway. “Home. I need to talk to my mother and I need to do it in person. She’s not as good at lying to me face to face.”

He lets out a ragged sigh she can hear, even over the sounds of the engine warming up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to screw up—”

But she cuts him off, “I’m not. Jughead, whatever else I’m feeling, and who even knows what that is right now, I’m _glad_ I know.”

“Why did you walk out?”

“Not right now, okay? Can we just focus on the Jason Blossom murder mystery plot?” There’s so much still for them to say, but she almost understands why he’d asked her that yesterday.

He’s silent a moment, then he says, “Are you okay?”

“No.” She lets out of shaky laugh. “Fuck no, definitely not. But I will be, once I get some answers.” But then the flight attendant comes by and signals that it’s time to switch to airplane mode. “I have to go, Jug. I’ll—I’ll call you, I guess. Later.”

“Okay.”

She hangs up without saying goodbye.

She can’t get comfortable during the flight. The ache between her thighs and across her shoulder blades reminds her how long it’s been since she’s been with a man **.** It also reminds her of the cost. She wonders if there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but the thought is too tiring. So, she stares out the window as the lake gives way to the fields and forests of Michigan, Ontario, and, eventually, to New York.

 

Betty walks out of the airport, and, for the second time in two days, dissolves into a puddle of tears **,** this time in her sister’s arms.

“Hey, hey, little sis—what’s wrong?” Polly’s perfected her mom voice over the years, and for a moment Betty lets it lull her into a false sense of security. Then she freezes as realizes she cannot tell Polly any of what she suspects. Not until she’s sure. “No-nothing. It’s just been a hard week and I didn’t realize how much I missed you.”

Polly pulls back from her, hands still on her shoulders. “Do we maybe need to stop for some ice cream and Midol on the way home?”

Betty manages to pull a laugh out of somewhere deep inside, her spleen maybe, and says, “I hadn’t even thought of that, but sure.”

“One pint of Tonight Dough coming up! Mom only has that no sugar added frozen yogurt at her house, and, believe me, you don’t want to eat it unless you have to.”

She lets her sister console her with the promise of frozen dairy products and pain relievers she doesn’t need as they bundle her suitcase into the car and pull away from the airport.

“I’m sorry I won’t be here for your visit, Betty. And mom won’t be back from her conference for a couple of days, so you’ll have the house to yourself.”

“That’s okay. I’m the one who didn’t give you any warning I was coming. Thank you for coming to get me.”

“Are you kidding? A whole hour of you to myself _and_ I don’t have to answer Cheryl’s incessant texts about SPF and not wearing mom shoes and _yes I’m sure we don’t need fast passes_ and _Disney World and Universal are plenty, we definitely don’t need to go to SeaWorld too_.” Betty rolls her eyes. Cheryl is some Frankenstein’s monster of sort-of-cousin and sort-of-sister-in-law and completely overbearing, but Betty couldn’t imagine her life without her. She just wishes Cheryl would stop trying to buy the twins’ love. One, it’s unnecessary, they adore her. And two, sometimes it makes Betty feel a little bad that she can’t do the same, no matter how much Polly hates when Cheryl goes over the top.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay, just for tonight? I can have Fletcher push back our reservation.”

“No you should go. Don’t let me derail your plans. Besides, I had to be at the airport so early, I didn’t sleep very well last night.”

Polly rolls her eyes but keeps them on the road. “Of course not. You could have gotten a later flight, you know. Like two weeks later.”

“I know, it was sort of an impulsive decision.”

“Betty Cooper doesn’t do impulsive.”

“Maybe now she does.”

Polly glances over at her. “You look happier.” It’s surprising thing to say, considering the tears that had met their reunion.

“Pol, I just busted out the waterworkswhen all you did was hug me.”

“Stop it. I mean, you seem brighter. Like you’re taking better care of yourself. You’re smiley-er.”

“You spend too much time talking to twelve year olds. But yeah, I think…I think overall I am. I mean, it’s been hard, being so much farther away from all of you and basically starting over. But I like my life so far.”

“I’m so happy for you even though I miss you so much. Maybe once we all get to Orlando, I can have the twins FaceTime with you.”

“That’d be great. We all? Who else is going on this adventure again? Besides Cheryl.”

“Me, the kids, Fletcher, Cheryl’s girlfriend. Cheryl’s picking them up and we’re all meeting up at the airport Wednesday, so Fletcher and I are going to spend tonight and tomorrow in Saratoga Springs, a little mini-vacation before the crazy.”

Betty turns her sister’s statement around. “You’re happy?”

Polly’s smile is so big that Betty thinks it must hurt. She grabs Betty’s hand where it rests on the console and squeezes it.

“Yeah, I’m happy.”

Betty’s heart clenches.

For the rest of the ride, Polly chatters happily about their vacation plans. As much as Betty had enjoyed Harry Potter world, the prospect of that many consecutive days in the full buffet of Orlando’s theme parks, packed into crowds like sardines, and in _August_ no less—she thinks it sounds like her own personalized version of hell.

But most of all, she thinks, she’s glad her sister won’t be here to see what’s coming. That she’ll have time to think of how to tell her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fletcher Foley is a real Archie comics character, but I haven’t read any of the issues he’s in.


	11. In which Betty Cooper keeps up with the Joneses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When her father died, her mother did a deep clean of every room of their house, ruthlessly erasing him from everything but the picture frames. But she wouldn't set foot in his office. She seemed to want to close that door and leave it closed, a memento mori for all their sins. Eventually, Polly had taken it upon herself to box up and transport what remained of their father to the basement. Which is where Betty stands, sweaty and streaked with grime, when Jughead finds her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Couple of things: I didn't actually mean to take a week off from this fic, but then that deleted scene happened and one shots took over my brain, so sorry. But, now I actually am planning on taking a week or so off while I wrap up a WIP and play a little catch up with Nobodies Nobody Knows. Currently, the plan is the post the next chapter of this fic on Sunday, Aug. 20, with two more chapters of NNK between now and then. But if I get stuck on NNK, I may do a switch and post it a few days earlier. I'm not good at sticking to my own posting schedules though, so you know, stay tuned.
> 
> Ami Tanura is also a real Archie universe character, though, again, one I’m completely twisting for my own benefit. Also, I’m sorry I put an alcoholic in a bar, but it’s important to a plot point in the next chapter.

Like clockwork, every visit home, she returns to Pop’s. It is the purest distillation of Riverdale, its heart and soul, its joy and nostalgia, its corruption and its artifice.

Today, though, the scars are hidden. The broken windows have been replaced, the spray paint scrubbed off. A dozen years down the line, and everyone pretends a man didn’t near to lose his life bleeding out on the floor and, in the process, touch off a civil war that shook them all to the bone.

She looks at Pop’s, shiny as a new penny, and still sees that broken-down shell, still feels the echo of her teenage self’s terror and rage. But today, thus far, is definitely better than yesterday.

Today, she arrives slightly out of breath in an old pair of leggings and a Riverdale High cheerleading t shirt she’d discovered in the back of her closet. The run to Pop’s is her half-hearted conciliatory gesture towards the amount of salt, sweet, and fat about to enter her body. Burger, fries, and a milkshake, Ben and Jerry’s, Starbucks—she can’t really bring herself to care. Pop’s is mandatory, emotional trauma makes her hungry, and she’s long since conquered the Alice Cooper voice in her ear that liked to equate dress size with beauty, and beauty with happiness.

This is the first time since they were born that Betty has been in Riverdale without her niece and nephew, their first summer at sleepaway camp a circumstance jointly engineered by her mother and Cheryl, who, horrifyingly, adore each other. There are a plethora of reasons their absence strikes Betty as weird but the one she keeps circling back to is that it is one more reminder of how her life has circled back to the year after their father’s death.

She’s cogitating on these thoughts, on the Riverdale that was, when a menu drops down in front of her face and a perky voice says, “Elizabeth Cooper!”

She looks up to a face she recognizes. Or rather, doesn’t exactly  _recognize_ , but a pattern of features she’d know anywhere. “Jellybean?”

“In the flesh.” Her face lights up when Betty can place her.

“Hi!” Betty sits up straighter. “Your brother mentioned you worked here now, but I completely forgot.”

“Yep, paying my dues as a minimum wage automaton and pestering Pop to change up the menu. Do you know what you’re having?”

“Don’t you dare touch a single thing on this menu. You’d have a riot on your hands. And, always. Cheeseburger, fries, and a vanilla shake.”

Jellybean scribbles on her notepad before sliding the pencil behind her ear. “Coming right up!”

When she comes back with Betty’s food, the milkshake is adorned with a second strawberry, and the plate contains a little dish of mayonnaise tucked in amongst more fries than Betty can possibly eat.

“Pop said the garlic mayo has always your favorite. He also said, and I quote, he’s ‘glad the big city hasn’t ruined your appetite.’”

Betty can’t help but laugh even as she rolls her eyes. “He says that every time I come in.” They’d bonded over the long nights in which Betty would sit at the counter, staying late to finish whatever article or essay she was working on, Pop feeding her caffeine addiction. Sometimes she thought he knew she was hoping Jughead would show. Not that he did very often.

“So did you ever find that dining set you were looking for?”

Betty can feel the surprise on her face when Jellybean follows up with, “Sorry, I feel like I know you. Your family talks about you a lot, and, well, Jughead.”

Betty smiles at her. “You do know me. After all, I did babysit you for five years.”

JB’s answering smile would light up a subdivision. “Yeah I guess you did.” It seems to dissolve some of the awkwardness between them. She doesn’t know what Jellybean knows about her and Jughead, though she suspects it’s more than she herself does.

Betty eats her food slowly, continuing to pick at the fries long after she’s full. Now, when Jellybean comes to check on her, she shares delightful anecdotes, like about the aneurysm Jughead had had when Jellybean had started dating or how he insisted they go out and chop down a real tree every Christmas, even if it meant he was the one vacuuming up the fallen needles every day cause Lord knows neither Jellybean nor FP were willing to. She opens a door into the domestic details that Betty, though she couldn’t have put it into words, had missed the most. She tells her about being fourteen, and crying in her room when FP had bought the wrong tampons, only for Jughead to sneak in later that night with the right ones. And being sixteen, when he did a special reunion tour with his Serpents jacket and motorcycle to intimidate the fuck out of some jerkwad who was harassing her, saying she only kissed girls for attention.

Betty’s staring out the window and stirring her straw around in her empty milkshake glass when Jellybean returns. “B. Coop, you look distracted. Is it about my brother?” she asks as she slides in across from Betty. Then she wiggles her shoulders until her head rests against the backrest of the booth and stretches her legs out so her black converse are on the bench beside Betty.

Betty pushes back her smile. “Sort of. I just found out something about when we were dating and it’s filling in some missing puzzle pieces. I’m still processing.”

“Ah, so you finally know. I would like it formally on the record that I’ve been bugging him to tell you for years.”

“Noted.” Betty’s voice sounds stiffer than she means it to be, as she realizes that her hunch was right. Jellybean, and probably the whole world, knew before she did.

“I don’t mean to get in the middle of it or anything. I know it’s your guys’ business. I’m just a firm believer in saying things while you still have the chance.”

“Yeah, I get that. And, hey, I was sorry to hear about your mom.”

Jellybean shrugs. “Thanks. I would say the same about your dad—I mean, I’m sorry for you and Polly and the twins—“

“It’s okay. Honestly, right now, I’m kind of glad about it. He’s safer where he is. And I have no idea where I would start if he were still here.”

“Look, again, not my business, but, do you think you can forgive him now that you know?”

She sighs, “I really don’t know. I can’t even think about it yet. Right now, I just want to find out the truth. It’s all I’ve ever really wanted. And forgiving him for not telling me then is one thing, but now there’s other…” she lets her words trail off as she looks back out the window. Then she corrects her posture and turns back to Jellybean. “Anyway, I’m not the same girl as I was when I was 15.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I can’t be. That girl was fearless, throwing herself into situations—into people—with no thought of the outcome. Growing up means learning to look before you leap.”

“Of all of the things that may have changed about you, I’m pretty sure that’s one that hasn’t. After all, didn’t you just up and move halfway across the country to a city where you only knew like three people, one of whom you weren’t speaking to? Didn’t you just show up here, determined to find out the truth about your father, no matter how much it will hurt you? The fear may be there, but the grit is stronger.”

Betty reaches a hand across the table and settles it on the other girl’s arm. Jellybean responds by placing her hand on top of Betty’s.

“When’d you get so wise? It makes me feel old.”

They’re still sitting in a shy but contented silence when a tiny Japanese girl plops down on the bench beside Jellybean, pecks her on the lips, and tosses a leg across her lap in an easy gesture that Betty so envies. A dreamy look flits across Jellybean’s face, before being replaced by a smile.

“Ami Tanura, this is Betty Cooper. She used to babysit me. She’s a…friend of my brother’s.” Jellybean’s voice picks up on the word ‘friend’ as if it were a question, and Ami’s eyes cut from Betty’s face to her girlfriend’s. But she quickly schools her expression back into friendly interest.

“Oh cool! Jughead’s awesome. So you’ve read his book, right?”

“Yes. I’ve definitely read his book. I actually just interviewed him for the newspaper I work for.”

“Awesome. We’re obviously big fans. Some of the kids at school actually used one of his lines for their senior quotes in the yearbook.” Betty wonders if Jellybean’s told her brother that. She can imagine exactly the kind of face he would make. This whole afternoon has made it harder and harder for her to be mad at him.

Jellybean interrupts her thoughts. “Anyway we gotta go. Got dorm shopping to do.“

"Oh so you decided to go?”

“No.” Then she grumbles something under her breath Betty can’t quite make out, though she’s sure it has to do with interfering big brothers. “Ami’s going to Skidmore.”

“Oh, congratulations! I went to Vassar. They’re in the same athletic conference.”

“Cool! All of the sports genes in my family definitely went to my sister but I’m great at being an athletic supporter.” Betty laughs when she catches the reference.

“Yeah, she’s been to all of my field hockey games since, like, sophomore year.”

“I may have had an ulterior motive for that.”

“Whatever. I still appreciated it.” She pushes Ami off of her to get her out of the booth, then follows, before explaining to Betty, “Tuesday’s the day Dad’s at the Whyte Wyrm late doing inventory and accounts and stuff, so it’s our weekly date night.” Betty doesn’t miss the look exchanged between the two and its charged undercurrent. She grasps, with a bit of chagrin, that she’s most definitely the adult in this situation. "Okay, well have fun then. But, you know, safe fun.”

Jellybean rolls her eyes then pulls Betty out of the booth to hug her. She’s surprised and touched. It’s been half a lifetime, and yet, Betty realizes, some people are family no matter how long it’s been. She’s pleased to know that Jellybean is one of those people for her.

“I’m glad you came in today. I’m kind of shocked that I’ve been back four years and we haven’t managed to do this yet.”

“Me too. And I’m glad all thebullshitbetween our families doesn’t have to affect us.”

They smile at each other as they pull away, and Betty can’t help but feel a link has been forged, one independent even from Jughead.

“Oh wait!” Jellybean scribbles something on the pad in her apron, then tears the sheet off and places it facedown on the table. “Just take it up to Pop when you’re ready, Betty.”

Then she takes Ami’s hand and they leave, laughing with an intimacy that makes Betty’s heart ache.

 

It’s late that afternoon when Betty shows up at the Whyte Wyrm. They’re closed on Tuesdays, but when she knocks, FP opens the door and she’s surprised at her second warm greeting from a member of the Jones clan. As FP holds the door open for her, he says, “Well aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

He is too. He retains the masculine Jones uniform of dark jeans, t shirt, flannel, but his eyes are less red, less haunted, than she remembers. Granted last time she saw him he was sitting in a cell.

“Hi Mr. Jones. I don’t want to disturb you, I know you’re working. I just had something I wanted to talk to you about, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not, Betty. Come in. And I think you’re old enough to call me FP.” He leads her to the bar, where he seems to be putting away glasses, so she climbs up on a stool and hugs her purse to her lap.

“Can I get you anything? I’m not supposed to serve when we’re not open, but I think we can make an exception for you.”

“Oh, no. Just water’s fine.” He uses the soda gun to fill a glass with seltzer and tosses a lime slice over his shoulder that lands in the glass with a satisfying  _plink._  Betty claps.

She takes a sip of her drink, then says, “It’s been a long time. How have you been?”

“Good, good. Keeping out of trouble. At least, except for the kind my eighteen year old daughter likes to land me in.”

Betty cracks a grin. “I just saw Jellybean at Pop’s. And I met Ami.”

“They’ve been together a while now. I like her. JB can be so serious sometimes, like she’s got the world on her shoulders. Ami helps with that.  The girl definitely takes after her brother, though. You see much of him?”

“Ah, yes, actually. I saw him this weekend.” In a Biblical sense. She feels awkward, as she runs her thumb up and down the seam of her leggings. “Look, I was at his apartment Sunday and I found some photos. I know my dad was here the night Jason Blossom was killed.”

FP’s eyebrows climb up to his hairline for a minute. Then he settles his face and reaches both arms out to brace himself against the bar. “You’re a straight shooter like your mother.”

The comparison always makes her uncomfortable, but especially now when she’s unsure what Alice nows, how complicit she was in the attempted framing of the man in front of her.

“Yeah. I want to apologize on behalf of my family.”

He doesn’t pretend not to know what she’s talking about. “Betty, you don’t have to do that. You’re not responsible for them. Regardless of what your dad did or didn’t do, his testimony is why I got such a short sentence. It’s why I got to be here for my baby girl to be in high school.”

“Do you know what he did?”

FP shakes his head as he wipes down the bar. “I don’t know what to tell you, kiddo. I definitely can’t tell you anything Jug hasn’t already. I didn’t know anything til I got the call from Mustang and showed up to clean up the body. Your dad was long gone by then. I didn’t even know he was here till Jug told me.”

Betty nods and then watches the sweep of the rag for a minute or two.

“Okay, well I really just wanted to apologize and ask—But I should go. Let you get back to work.”

“Okay. Here, let me walk you out.”

After he’s held the door for her again, he blocks it open with his body and crosses his arms. “I don’t know what’s going on between you and my son but I know you’re a good person. Don’t hurt him like that again. He wouldn’t survive it.”

Betty’s mouth drops open and for a moment, she’s indignant. He talks like it’s her fault. Like _she_ broke _his_ heart. But then, maybe she did. She rubs her lips together before she answers. “I’m not trying to.”

He looks at her like her knows something about her she doesn’t. “Take care, Betty.”

“You too, FP.”

 

When her father died, her mother did a deep clean of every room of their house, ruthlessly erasing him from everything but the picture frames. But she wouldn’t set foot in his office. She seemed to want to close that door and leave it closed, a memento mori for all their sins. Eventually, Polly had taken it upon herself to box up and transport what remained of their father to the basement. Which is where Betty stands, sweaty and streaked with grime, when Jughead finds her.

“Betty.”

“Jesus Christ, Jughead. What are you doing here?” She clutches her chest like a heroine in a period film before bending down to sit on a box until her heart stops pounding.

He shrugs and leans against a cement column. “I followed you. Booked a flight as soon as we hung up yesterday.” Surprised as she is at his sudden appearance in her basement, she’s not surprised he came. She wonders what that says about her, about them.

“How’d you get in?”

“Fred Andrews still has your spare key, and I still know where his hide-a-key is.”

Betty sighs. Then, she realizes his body is strung taut as a wire. “Why did you come, Jughead?”

“I’ve been trying to solve this mystery for over ten years. You’re the first real lead I’ve gotten. Do you really think I’d let you investigate it without me?” He pushes off the column and stalks towards her. “Besides, I know you. When there’s a puzzle in your head, you’re like a dog with a bone. You need someone to tell you when to give it a rest.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You harassed Sheriff Keller. You questioned FP. What’s next, Betty? Were you going to interrogate Jellybean?” Betty feels heat suffuse her face. “Oh, you thought I wouldn’t know about that, huh?”

“I did see JB,” she mumbles.

“Fuck, I knew she was lying.” By now he’s standing over her and she’s trembling.

“Jughead, I’m not— I know you did everything you could but you didn’t find anything. I know my dad is dead so it’s probably a fool’s errand. But I have to try. I mean, there’s all this evidence—” she sweeps her hands toward the boxes around her, “that you didn’t have access to. And who knows what my mom knows.”

“Okay, but you can’t cut me out of this.”

“Ditto. Not anymore. Clearly neither of us is good at investigating on our own.” She jumps up and hugs him and for moment she feels him stiffen, but then his arms come around her and she slips her fingers into his beanie-less hair while he rests his head in her neck. They take a shared breath, torsos rising and falling together.

She whispers into his shirt, “I’m so tired. I don’t want to fight anymore.” You can only wage a war on so many fronts.

“Me either.”

“So cease fire? While we figure this out?”

“Cease fire. But with one rule: we leave FP out of this. He’s finally got his life together and moved on. Our mutual obsession doesn’t have to be his.”

“Deal.”

Before he shows up, she would have sworn she didn’t want him here. That she couldn’t handle the twin eddies of feeling—one about her father the potential murderer and one about her ex-boyfriend who he sacrificed like a chess pawn. But before, she felt overwhelmed at the sheer mountain of things she did not know. Now, she feels stronger.

So, they make a plan. Holmes and Watson, Nancy and Ned, reunited once again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The unofficial soundtrack of this fic is Adele's "When We Were Young." Actually, scratch that. It's the official soundtrack. I'm in charge and I can do that.

**Author's Note:**

> your comments make me happy cry
> 
> https://cooperjones2020.tumblr.com/


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